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The greatest possible health care reform would be achieved if we'd just finally listen to George Macauley Trevelyan.

walk and enjoy

Speaking of enjoying life and being happy...

"Keep your health, it's better than all the truths in the firmament." William James

"Just get up and move"

I forget if I've mentioned this here before (really), but like many in my Boomer demographic I fret a bit about occasional, disquieting lapses of memory. Mostly they're the niggling kind the Times Well blog calls "mundane, creeping memory loss that begins about the time our 30s recede, when car keys and people’s names evaporate."  My 30s are definitely receded. This has been a small but persistent issue for, um, for I forget how long.

So,  as a daily walker and semi-daily biker, I'm pleased by new research on this topic indicating the leveraged rewards that can come of even the mildest exertion.

“Our results indicate that vigorous exercise isn’t necessary” to protect your mind, Dr. Middleton said. “I think that’s exciting. It might inspire people who would be intimidated about the idea of quote-unquote exercising to just get up and move.”

 Just get up and move: a good mantra for us all, if we can remember it. If the years have taught me anything they've taught me this: write it down. Then, get up and move.  

And remember to think about Nietzsche's cryptic remark that "in the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness: the ability to forget..." 


Then again, he forgot a whole lot in his last decade but doesn't seem to have been all that happy.

"Is Happiness Catching?"

In today's Times Magazine-

A key to happiness, say researchers, is "daily exposure to many small moments of contagious happiness. When you frequently see other people smile — at home, in the street, at your local bar — your spirits are repeatedly affected by your mirroring of their emotional state. Of course, the danger of being highly connected to lots of people is that you’re at risk of encountering many people when they are in bad moods. But Christakis and Fowler say their findings show that the gamble of increased sociability pays off, for a surprising reason: Happiness is more contagious than unhappiness. According to their statistical analysis, each additional happy friend boosts your good cheer by 9 percent, while each additional unhappy friend drags you down by only 7 percent. So by this logic, adding more links to your network should — mathematically — add to your store of happiness."

And:

[Happy subjects] influenced one another’s health just by socializing. And the same was true of bad behaviors — clusters of friends appeared to “infect” each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking. Staying healthy isn’t just a matter of your genes and your diet, it seems. Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people."

So: have lots of healthy and happy friends, and try to give as good as you get. Infect someone with a smile. The "up" multiplier is stronger than the "down," positive good vibrations are contagious.

Singer on health care

Philosopher/ethicist Peter Singer has a new Times Magazine piece, "Why We Must Ration Health Care." It's been #1 on the "most e-mailed" list for two days. (Take note, all you philosophers who think it's a waste of time to address a wide audience.)

He concludes with an interesting riposte to all those Fox News types who say Americans won't stand for "socialized medicine... just ask the Canadians and Brits." Well, Gallup did ask if they had confidence in their health care systems. The score: 73% in Canada and the U.K., 56% here.

Drunk on the ground

William James pitied "poor Nietzsche's antipathy," as most of us who were early smitten with Zarathustra eventually do. See Gary Kamiya's "Falling Out With Superman," for instance. Or the alienated teen in "Little Miss Sunshine" who (unlike his hero) eventually reconciles with, and rejoins, the human race. (When Nietzsche Wept is another cinematic tribute that has its moments of insight.)

But somehow the books remain, in some pre-postmodern way detached from their author and standing magnificently apart... as on a tall peak just beyond reach. The Dawn, Human, All too Human, Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals, Antichrist, Twilight of the Idols, Gay Science, Thus Spake Zarathustra... Works of genius, and of despair that refuses to name and accept its condition. But, with enough of the truth to arrest a young person who knows this can't be all there is, who knows there has to be something better still to come. But (this sensibility attests) it must come here, in this life, and perhaps recurrently, eternally.

James and Nietzsche did have in common a mutual affinity for the heights, bracing and invigorating and (ultimately, forJames) terminal. Mountain hikes became James's "main hold on primeval sanity and health of soul." Maybe he was insane to hike so hard in his condition, at his age (60+ with a fluttery heart), but he might have been crazy not to. In 1899 he told his brother Henry, the novelist, that his "ridiculous cardiac weakness" was inconvenient, that his strenuous hikes had probably strained his heart, but that he nonetheless was "glad I had the experience, even at the price!"

Alain de Boton chronicles the price Nietzsche paid, tracing the bleak objective day-to-day mundanities of

his soaring Swiss Mountain philosophy. "Nietzsche spent seven years in Sils-Maria... He would rise at five," work all morning in his small rented room, then hit the peaks. (That's Piz Corvatsch.) In the evening, typically, it was back to the room, a solitary dinner, and an early bed. Sounds stark and easy, and to most of us drearily depressing. But it must have been hard. That's what he liked most about climbing mountains, and writing books: the difficulty and challenge and growth-opportunity ("What doesn't kill me" etc.) of scaling those imposing altitudes. Then, the great payoff at the summit, "a primal delight at being alive to see such beauty."

Again, Nietzsche (the rare tea-totaling German) admired Emerson... who could get drunk sober, simply treading the bare flat ground. (In Nature Emerson famously wrote: "Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.")

Me too. Crossing Hillwood High School's playing fields with my dogs, in dappled morning sunlight, thinking only of getting home and having a good breakfast... It happens all the time.

I love the mountains as much as the next philosopher, but I really think it's more about where you plant your head than your feet.

None of which is to deny that feet, particularly feet in motion, are indispensable too. We have walked far, up and down and all around. Walk on.

oldest recorded footprints