Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
...the gym is a kind of wildlife preserve for bodily exertion. A preserve protects species whose habitat is vanishing elsewhere, and the gym (and home gym) accommodates the survival of bodies after the abandonment of the original sites of bodily exertion.
Interpretation
The gym serves as a sanctuary for physical fitness, preserving the need for exercise in a world where it is often neglected.
Rebecca Solnit's quote highlights the importance of gyms as places that nurture and maintain our physical bodies in a society that increasingly overlooks the necessity of physical exertion. Just as wildlife preserves protect endangered species by providing them a safe environment, gyms offer a refuge for those who seek to engage in physical activity and foster their health amidst a lifestyle that may promote sedentary behaviors.
In practice
This quote could be shared in a fitness class to inspire participants about the importance of regular exercise.
Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.
We have a real role in how our own collective lives, our nation, and our world and society turn out. Seizing those opportunities is important, and disasters are sometimes one of those opportunities.
If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.
Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.
We spend billions on marginal and often unnecessary procedures on people who are in the final dying process, yet we leave millions of Americans out of the health insurance system, and America's kids have the worst dental health in the developed world.
To a significant degree, we are an overfed and undernourished nation digging an early grave with our teeth, and lacking the energy that could be ours because we overindulge in junk foods.
Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet; in an environment equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying... Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition and die.
Exercise is really important to me - it's therapeutic. So if I'm ever feeling tense or stressed or like I'm about to have a meltdown, I'll put on my iPod and head to the gym or out on a bike ride along Lake Michigan with the girls.
Nothing is more fatal to health than an over care of it.
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