Why don’t we exercise? Why don’t we get out into Nature? Why don’t we connect with God and Christ? Why don’t we feed our spirits? Why don’t we nourish our souls? Why don’t we stretch our minds?
Why don’t we?
Why do we atrophy, whether physically, spiritually, emotionally, socially, or mentally? Why do we let ourselves just waste away, in any one – or all – of these areas? Why do we deny ourselves a better life?
What “Doctor Do It” Says
The other day I was talking to a childhood friend about this very trait we humans have: To stop doing. In fact, he’d just written his Doctoral dissertation* about this subject from a physical perspective.
To understand the depth of his concern, you must know him as I have. From our childhood, he was always the most in-shape, active person I ever knew. An early fan of Bruce Lee, he studied and practiced martial arts. He told me (paraphrasing Bruce Lee) that “When you put limits on yourself, you hold yourself back.” He also believes in the concept attributed to the Navy Seals but used throughout the military: “When you reach where your mind says is your limit, you have only approached 40% of your capability in whatever it is you are doing.”
He ran track, played hoops, and was involved in all sorts of sports on a personal and team level. As a result, his body, his physical presence, was the envy of everyone who knew him.
And it didn’t stop as he grew older. In college at BYU, he was on the university’s track team. He played hoops there, too, and almost any other sport he could think of. He wasn’t a star athlete, but he was in shape, and being in shape was important to him.
This kept up as he got older. After college, he made a career out of the Army, where he was a Ranger. In fact, we’d always kid him about jumping out of perfectly good airplanes just for fun.
Being Active When You Are Older
Most of us, sometime around our 30s or 40s, put away our sports dreams. We start to sit around more and more. Maybe we get out and do things outdoors, or play rec soccer or pickleball. But it becomes easier and easier to just … sit.
Not so my friend. After the Army, he started a cross-fit gym just outside of Denver. And this is where he started formulating his thesis for his Doctorate paper. He told me: “I see people come into the gym all the time who should know better. Doctors. Former trainers. Former athletes. And every one of them starts to go downhill the minute they say: “I can’t do that” or “I don’t want to do that” or “That would not be good for me because of XYZ reason.” And they start to atrophy.”
He is a big fan of this line from a movie: “Don’t use all of your muscles (brain cells, talents, etc.), only the ones you want to keep.”
He told me: “Our society tells us that at certain ages we have to change or stop doing things. This is so ingrained into our psyche that we almost automatically stop doing things. It takes a leap of faith to try to do them again.”
Eating His Own Dogfood
Interestingly, it was while he was working on his Doctoral thesis that he experienced the most profound insights into just how easy it is to fall into that “Do Nothing” trap. At almost the same time as he started putting in extra hours studying and writing, he got Covid. Bad. It laid him up for weeks. He could barely do more than study and work on his thesis.
When he recovered from Covid, he found himself making excuses to not go work out as much as he used to. “I’m still sick” he’d tell himself. “I need to work on this dissertation.” “There are other things I need to do.”
He felt himself spiraling downward, not only physically, but emotionally and mentally as well.
That’s when it hit him: Even when you don’t WANT to do something, get out and do it. In fact, he said that he discovered the best way to know you need to do something, is when you don’t want to do it.
Do it anyway.
He shared this “aha” moment with me: “Be positive. Avoid talking or thinking negatively about yourself in anything. Our church leaders have continually urged us to be positive. Even when we’re injured or spiritually or emotionally down, we have to be positive, we have to take that first step, no matter how small. That is progress.”
Everything Is Interconnected
At this point in our discussion, I realized I’d had the same epiphany the day before, about getting out and being in Nature, connecting to God and Christ in Nature, finding peace “out there”, and grounding and recharging.
I’d been feeling disconnected, out of sorts. There was a lack of peace in my life, and I felt like I was wandering and floundering, and not in a good way. I knew what the solution was. In fact, my wife wrote a book about finding peace in Nature and connecting with God and Christ. It outlines how we can find and connect with our core sacred selves, and how we can feel the message of love, peace, and joy that The Creator sends out through His Creations in Nature.
Every time I felt the urge to go out in the woods, to go down by the creek, to do something on our property, to “get my hands dirty”, I would find some excuse to stay indoors, to not do what I needed to do to reconnect. “I have to clean. I have to plan. I have to do laundry.” Or, even worse, “It’s too hot. It’s too bright. It’s too cold. It’s too windy. Not now, I have a headache.”
Doing Brings Healing
As my friend and I discussed his dissertation, and our mutual experiences, we realized that the problems were all interconnected. If you feel bad physically, you are off-center spiritually. If you’re disconnected emotionally, you don’t feel good physically or mentally. And on and on it goes.
But the solution is simple: Do it. Whatever it is that is holding you back, do it. No excuses. No logically reasoning. Just do it. If you’re hurting and feeling sluggish physically, go do something physical. Feeling “bleh” mentally? Challenge yourself by writing something, or solving a problem, or working on a mental task. Emotionally and socially disconnected? One of my favorite solutions is going out and doing karaoke, or going to a comedy club and laughing it up with others.
Disconnected from God? Study His Word. Listen to uplifting talks about Him. Pray. Ungrounded and disconnected from life? Get out into Nature. Touch a plant. Take photos of birds, flowers, bugs. Stare at the stars. Howl at the moon. Wave good morning to the sunrise. (In fact, this is on my mind so much recently that I wrote a blog about it a few days ago! https://spirittreefarms.com/when-natures-peace-isnt-working/ )
As my friend discovered, and as others have known for years, whatever the disconnect is, the solution, the healing, is found in doing the thing which seems so difficult. He points out that “When you stop doing things, they appear more difficult than they are, your confidence fails and you end up avoiding the thing you should be doing.”
In the opposite vein, when we start doing things, they become easier because our ability to do them increases, we gain confidence, and we end up doing the thing we should be doing.
“That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
In fact, as I’m writing this piece, I’m thinking I should call my friend by a new name: Doctor Do It.
Who Says What To Do?
As Dr. Do It and I discussed this, I realized something vital: While we may turn to others for help and advice in what to do and how to do it, ultimately, we have to decide, ourselves, what we are going to do.
In part, Dr. Do It gave me the inspiration for this. What I realized is that, in his gym, people come in seeking answers. They want him to tell them: “Do 50 of these, then 20 of these, then 100 of these, then repeat.” And for some people, that works.
Often, though, he works with them to help them decide and discover what THEY think they can do. And when they say they can’t do anything, then he encourages them by telling them to just do something.
Connecting With Nature Should NOT Be Just Another Bucket List Item
We have the same response when we at Spirit Tree Farms encourage people to get out into Nature, to find God and Christ’s peace in Nature. We often hear: “Oh, we don’t live out in the woods like you do. It’s too hard to get out and connect like you can.”
Someone recently told me that. My response? “Do you have a balcony? Go out and look at the sky. Do you have a front door? Step outside and feel the sun on your face. Is there a tree, a bush, a flower, a plant nearby? Maybe you even have one inside. Look at it. Examine it. Discover the wonder of that small bit of Nature.”
We hear too many people say: “Oh, I love going to the beach, to the woods, to the mountains. I love getting away from it all, and getting recharged. But I don’t do it enough.”
While bucket list trips are great, if that’s the only time we’re connecting with God and Christ in Nature, we’re missing the boat. Literally. Mother Nature is fantastic, whether on thousands of acres in Northwest Georgia, or hundreds of thousands of square miles in southern Utah, or a balcony view in Seattle, or rooftop garden in Harlem, or a small birdfeeder in Milwaukee.
After all, it’s not a contest to see how much, how big, you can experience Nature. Feeling God and Christ’s peace in Nature can be as wide as looking out over the Grand Canyon at sunset, or as small as seeing a blue wasp on a native wildflower. It can be as planned out as taking a long-awaited trip to the coast, or as spontaneous as waving at a flock of migrating geese honking wildly as they fly in their moving V over your back yard (can you tell what just happened to me?)
In much of the Northern Hemisphere right now, it’s autumn. Pick up a colored leaf, or watch it fall and float on the air, or tumble down the street. Feel the change in seasons. Smell the new scents. Taste the richness of the Earth.
Remember What Doctor Do It Says
Ok, I got sidetracked into Nature a bit. So that’s an example (Oh, look! A new type of native bee just landed on my deck railing!) No matter what it is that you’re feeling stuck with, and no matter how you feel, and no matter what your excuses are, the bottom line is to remember what my friend, Dr. Do It, says:
“Do something. Anything. Do it. And then do it some more. And then do more. And then find other things to do, and do them.”
Because, if you don’t do something, anything, you not only die.
You fail to live.
*Dr. Do It’s Dissertation can be found here: https://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqm&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:31300247
It is titled:
“PERCEPTIONS OF CROSSFIT PARTICIPANTS AGED 50-65 ABOUT HOW THEY MOTIVATE THEMSELVES TO ENGAGE IN INTENSE PHYSICAL ACTIVITY”
By MICHAEL J. VOGL, COL (Retired) US Army
Owner/Coach CrossFit Evergreen, Personal Defense Readiness Coach
University of Arizona Global Campus for DOCTOR OF PSYCHOLOGY
(“Bear Down”)