Integrate Exercise with Life
by Robert Bernstein

Santa Barbara Independent – January 1997

I have to laugh at your feature on fitness.

Only in our consumerist, alienated society would fitness be treated as a commodity to be bought and sold.

We have removed all natural physical efforts in our lives and now we must pay to put them back in. We have replaced walking and bicycling with driving. We ride the elevator when we can walk. We even have electric pencil sharpeners, staplers and fruit juicers when the manual ones seemed to do just fine.

Not only do we pay to get the physical exercise that we have removed from our natural lives, but we add hilarious irony to it by driving our cars to the gyms and other artificial exercise environments.

I do not claim to be Mr America. But by integrating my exercise into my daily routine I do stay fit by any medical standard of fitness. I usually walk and bicycle to shopping, to work and for lunchtime errands.

I not only manage to stay fit this way, but I achieve something that money cannot buy: An integrated, rather than an alienated, life.