Inspired by - How To Think About Exercise (Damon Young) (ENGLISH)

Bodies are not present-at-hand tools, requiring tinkering upon malfunction. Bodies are inherently us. We are not minds servicing bodies, nor are the bodies servicing our minds. We are not creatures torn between frail flesh and eternal spirit - both are eternal and perishable.

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Virtue is a combination of habit, desire and rationality. Virtue is neither solely mental nor solely physical - it requires action, desire, thought and will. It requires phronesis, or "practical wisdom". In practicing virtue, we are hopefully doing so while overcoming Cartesian dualisms. Exercising, whether we think of it as mental or physical, is in our best moments a commitment to wholeness, where each part informs the other parts to reach higher levels still.

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To live a good life, stories have to be pulled together as wholes. This is why we need virtues of integrity and constancy. Integrity is achieved in changing cirumstances, constance over changing times. Both character traits are tendencies toward wholeness, virtues of consistence which pull our stories together and create our personal narratives.

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The ambition toward wholeness is not one of scale, but of scope: enrolling more of our humanity into our practice/exercise. Working out isn't solely a commandment, and it isn't solely something for itself or something done to prepare us for the world outside of the gym. Working out is something both within and outside the usual confines of our lives away from the gym. It is somethng braided into the sometimes fraying strings of outside life. In a sense, it is like the relationship between mind and body - we are defined by neither, but by their intimate congress. Working out is what we bring into the gym, and what we take with us from there. It is also what stays in there, and what just happens there and has neither time nor place, no staying power nor ability to be taken with upon exiting. Working out is both just do it and just become it. It is also the bliss beyond any distinctions we might think of to categorize, analyze and compartmentalize.