A mere fifty stairs a day

Thursday 5/28/26

Going up fifty stairs each day--a mere fifty stairs--reduces your risk of cardiovascular disease by 20%. If you take the subway to work, that would basically mean forgoing the escalator each way and using the stairs instead.

Think of how little effort that is. It's not so much an effort thing as a "I decide to commit and do it this way" deal.

We're not good at that. Implementing a personal policy and sticking to it. We can do it, in theory, in most of, if not all, the areas of our lives. For all our talk about not having control, there are all these things we can control that would benefit us which we choose not to.

This kind of decision-making and implementation also becomes a memory issue. Something that isn't spoken about much right now in terms of how we live and what we get worse at and become increasingly unable to do is how our memories are worsening and our role in that degradation.

Especially our short term memory--that form of memory that plays, or could play, such a hands on role in our daily lives. Yes, we'll still remember that first kiss or a moment from our past in which we were hurt in a way we hadn't been hurt before and that altered us as a result, but that which we told ourselves we'd do yesterday is forgotten come tomorrow.

We experience this with the passage of seconds as well. A person is scrolling on their phone, they see something that prompts them to think they should look something else up, they go to a search engine, there's the blank field, and they can't recall what they wanted to find out basically within that same instant.

I bet that sounds awfully familiar to anyone happening to read this entry here in the time period in which it was written.

Vigilance is required to keep doing things that are right. The word "vigilance" sounds aggressive, doesn't it? Almost angry. Forceful. It sounds kind of hardcore. "Intense."

Bad stuff in a world of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and doing what you feel like rather than what you should do, with its preponderance allowances, excuses, and engineered soft landings rather than dogged attempts to scale walls and break through ceilings.

What vigilance is really about, though, is keeping a beneficial idea present. Having it playing consciously, actively in your mind so that it can be attended to. Fulfilled.

But we require healthy, fit minds in order to be vigilant when it comes to the many things we should be doing it and which are necessary in order to be making good and helpful choices, both for ourselves and others.

Do you see what's happening with the rotting of our minds? The trickle down effects are actually like torrent down/here-comes-the-flood effects.

Honor, decency, mental and physical physical health, are washed away, carried far, far, far downstream. We don't see them, we don't remember them, we don't know what they were or are.

If I had children, I'd tell them early on in their lives to always take the stairs. And that stairs weren't just stairs. Take the stairs in all things in life.

Shortcuts have this ironic knack for making you instead go the long way around, big picture-wise and person-wise. Doing things the right way is what helps you make more of your time because this is what gives you more energy.

A productive hour beats a shaved-down, corner-cutted five minutes because of what that hour does for you in other parts of your life and personage. The time comes back to you and it also feels like less of an albatross and instead more of a songbird.

You don't lose time but gain in efficiency, energy, health, clarity. Thus, you're able to do more with the time you have and see and understand time differently as well. Rather than being mastered by time--as in, "I never have the time"--you have greater say and agency.

One has a healthy relationship with time by doing, not by trying not to do.

Always take the stairs. They add up in more ways than one.