“Save your strength for tonight!” my neighbor called after me.
I was jogging up the hill, okay struggling the last few steps at the top as I finished my relatively brief jaunt through the neighborhood. She knew I had a fitness session scheduled with area club coaches that evening, thus the “save your strength!”
This is a funny approach adults take toward activity. I hear them caution their kids about it all the time. “Don’t use up your energy.” “Rest up, you have a meet tonight.” I even saw a middle school sister tell her younger sibling, who was happily dribbling her soccer ball down the street toward the neighbor’s to catch a ride to her travel soccer practice, “Stop. You’ll get tired.”
Activity is a funny thing. People consider it a scarce resource. A limited and dose related commodity. You only get so much each day. When you’re out, you’re done. That’s funny because, in so many ways – at least for the healthy person, it’s the reverse: if you’re active you have more energy. True, you may be a bit winded right after or even sore the next day. But, given a bit of time and a regular routine, using energy gives you more of it.
I am wondering whether exercise defies the law of conservation of energy, the one that says energy can be neither created or destroyed. I imagine not. It probably just changes its form – from stored/potential energy to mechanical/kinetic energy. The more we use, the more we call on our body to make available. We just don’t know how much we have in storage until we call it up for duty.
That sounds like a lot of what makes us. The more we call on it the more resources we make ready for next time. Sort of like a cup we pour out that keeps being refilled. A cup that doesn’t quite overflow – except for the antsy, ADD types of us out there. A refillable cup. Free refills that we only get when the level goes below the line. When we’re nearly empty.
What a nice image that is: God holding a pitcher, ready to splash into my cup. Makes me want to share a bit more, be a bit less stingy and a tad less conservative in my self-resource doling. I may just throw caution to the wind and jump into the game with the kids.
After all, if energy is renewable resource, then using what I have may be just the way to make room for more. I guess giving it a try is the only way I am going to find out. No sense in holding back; it’ll just make me tired.