None Of Us Really Move Any More

There are five of you in this house and you are in four different rooms.

It is eight in the evening. Everybody is fine. Nobody is in trouble, nobody is unhappy, the dinner was fine and the day was fine. Five people, four rooms, and there is no particular reason for any of it.

And you noticed tonight, for some reason, and it landed slightly harder than it should have.

Because you cannot remember when this started.

There was a period when this family was physically together and physically moving. You went places. The children went out of the door and came back muddy. Somebody was always trying to get somebody else to come and look at something outside. And you could not put a date on when that stopped, or a reason, because there was not one. It thinned out, the way things do.

So let me say what this site is and what it is not, right at the front, because the word fitness is on the door and it will make you brace.

Nothing here is about anybody's weight or size or shape. Not once, in any of the seven, not even to reassure you about it. That is a different subject and it belongs somewhere else, and if it were the subject here it would poison every article on this site.

And nothing here is a program. There is no plan, no progression, no six weeks to anything, and I will not be counting for you.

This is about a household being in the same place, using their bodies, for ten minutes, together. That is the whole subject. The moving is almost the excuse.

Two are better than one

There is a line in Ecclesiastes about company that people quote at weddings, and read plainly it is much more practical than that.

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. (Ecclesiastes 4:9, King James Version)

Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor.

Now notice the reason given, because it is not the one people usually supply. It does not say two are better because company is pleasant. It says because of what happens to the labor.

The whole passage is about work: two people working, one falling and the other lifting him up, two lying together and keeping warm. It is an argument about effectiveness, made in physical terms, about bodies.

And the specific claim is that the same effort produces more when there is somebody alongside.

That is not sentiment. Anybody who has ever done a hard task with another person knows it is true, and knows that the difference is not that they helped. The difference is that it was survivable, and so it got finished.

Which is exactly the mechanism you need tonight, and it is why I am not going to suggest you go out for a walk on your own.

You have tried that. Everybody has. A person on their own, tired, at eight in the evening, will not go, and the failure to go becomes one more small entry in the record of things you meant to do. But a thing arranged with somebody else in the house happens, because there is now a second person who knows about it.

You are able to do together what neither of you will do alone, and it has never once been a matter of one of you being stronger. Ecclesiastes 4:9 puts the reward in the labor of two rather than in the pleasure of company, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a household out of four rooms.

The unit is one other person

Here is the practical thing, and it is the whole design of this article.

Do not try to move the family.

You have five people, and getting five people out of the door at eight in the evening is a project. It requires persuasion, and negotiation, and somebody will say no, and then the refusal becomes the event of the evening and you will not attempt it again for a month.

So the unit is not the family. It is you and one other person.

One. Whoever is nearest, whoever is easiest, whoever happens to be in the room. It genuinely does not matter which one, and picking the hardest one to prove something is a way of guaranteeing failure.

And you do not announce it as a new family practice. You do not say we are going to start doing this. That sentence turns a walk into a policy, and a policy invites resistance, and children can hear a policy through a wall.

You say: come to the end of the street with me. That is the whole of it.

What happens after that is not your business tonight. It might be that nobody else notices. It might be that somebody asks where you went. You are not laying a foundation, you are doing one thing once, and the reason that works is that it cannot fail in any way that costs anything.

You are able to take one person to the end of the street, and it has never once required the whole household to agree first. The written word makes its case about two rather than about a crowd, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a father asking somebody to come outside.

The end of the street and back

So here is the assignment.

Walk to the end of the street and back with one other person in the house.

The end of the street. Not a walk. Not around the block, not up to the park, not thirty minutes. The end of the street and back, which in most places is about six minutes.

I know how small that is. It is small on purpose, and here is the reasoning.

You are not trying to achieve anything with your body tonight. Six minutes will not make anybody fitter and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What six minutes does is get two people out of a house together, in the air, side by side rather than facing each other, which is the arrangement in which people say things they would not say across a table.

Go tonight if you can, or tomorrow. Coats on, out, down, back.

And do not fill it with anything. Do not use it to have a conversation you have been meaning to have. Do not ask how school is going. The moment it has an agenda it becomes a summons, and they will feel it, and next time they will not come.

Just walk to the end of the street.

You are able to get two of you out of the house for six minutes, and it has never once needed to accomplish anything to be worth doing. Ecclesiastes 4:9 gives the reward to the labor of two, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with two people walking to a corner and turning round.