Does Aging Cause Us To Break Down?
Jul 09, 2017
Have you ever had something happen to you, a pain, an ache, or an injury, and chalked it up to the “fact” that you are simply aging? To be completely honest, as I spend more time here on Earth, that temptation does often beg me to follow it. I’m not sure if it is me knowing that I’ve actually spent quite a few years here, or if it’s me understanding that life moves by pretty quickly and I simply want to live it out with strength. Either way, once in a while, I do have to fight the corrupt thought that the body wears with age.
Why do I call this a corrupt thought? Well, when I was in my twenties I graciously gave myself several injuries like tendonitis, muscle strains, muscle tears, or whatever. Heck, I believed somehow if I was not hurting after I trained, I wasn’t doing it right. I also believed that pain came with being “healthy.” BUT i never once questioned that my issues were a result of my age. No sir, my issues were a result of my stupidity, and I owned them.
My point is, in my youth, I had aches and pains. I hurt my back, my shoulders, my elbows, my knees, and not once was there ever a thought that i was hurt because I was growing older. The truth is, I hurt because I was delusional about an idea I held onto about physical training and I was also living my life. In life, stuff happens and sometimes you just get hurt.
So why then, 20 years later, when I feel an ache or something tries to grab my attention, do I have to fight the thoughts of “it’s normal with age?” Have you done this? Do you fight those thoughts? Do they win? Do you shrink to them? Don’t. They are corrupt. They are like weeds that try to take over a beautiful lawn or garden. And your mind is the garden. You must tend to it.
The truth is things do happen. You may hurt, ache, limp, hobble, wince, or whatever. But those things can and do happen at any age. It’s your mindset, your “garden”, that greatly determines the downstream effect these issues have on you. Look at children, when they get injured, they usually don’t think they are broken or falling apart. If a teenager hurts his back picking up his dog, he doesn’t think, “Well, this was bound to happen. After all, I am 17.” Ok, a teenager hurting his back from picking up a dog is a whole other issue, but I think you get my point. Anyway, younger folk, tend to move on, literally. Kids keep playing. They don’t let their issue consume their minds and they don’t forecast their demise from them either. Whether they know it or not, they assume their body will heal.
So why don’t we? Why don’t we too, assume our bodies will heal and move on? Do we really need to own a “bad back” or a “trick knee”? Do we really need to claim arthritis?
Our body is made to heal, right? Yes. The answer is yes.
via GIPHY
But the weeds and the “facts” trip us up. Sometimes the norms don’t actually show the true story. Is it normal to get arthritis with age? Or is it normal to get arthritis by sitting around and not moving your joints? Is it normal for mens’ testosterone levels to drop with age? Or is it normal for men to consume lots of xenoestrogens from all the plastics, chemicals, and added hormones in food that we fill our lives with? Our issues may show a correlation with our age, but that does not mean that our age is the causation of our issues.
We have to protect our minds by knowing the right things and looking for the real story. Look, our design is better than the norms that fill our world. Our body is made to heal, made to be resilient. But it is also made to carry out its design. What if the majority of all our problems, was the real unseen story? What if the real story is this: As we age we sleep less, we eat less real food, we sit nearly all our waking hours, we live our lives stressed out behind technology that feeds our fears, and we expect one concentrated hour of overcompensated movement to magically fix all our needs? What if its not our age, but our ignorance and our misplaced notions.
If you know things are happening to your body that shouldn’t, don’t accept them or settle for them. Know you are designed to heal. AND, open your eyes. Are you missing something? Are you seeing the real causation? Or are the world’s normals simply trying to corrupt your mind to keep you from living the life you were meant to have?
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