I was walking with a friend one night, when we saw what we thought was someone crouched down working on their fence. It seemed a bit odd, given that it was about 9:00 at night, but anything is possible. We then heard a cry from help, and realised it wasn't someone working on their fence. Instead, it was an elderly lady who had fallen while out for a walk.
The lady had just recently had a knee reconstruction, and was out for a walk as part of her attempts to get her fitness back. She had walked across a grassy section, had her walking stick give out and had fallen. There was no way she could get up - she couldn't bend her leg to reposition her body and couldn't load one of her shoulders, as she had fallen heavily onto it. It took about 5 minutes to get her to her feet, after which we walked her back to her house, which was about 50 m further down the road. We saw her in, told her to take some anti-inflammatory medication if she was able to, and to see her doctor in the morning.
We continued our walk, but the incident stuck in my mind - I wondered if she had ever thought that she would be so reliant on the help of others. I wondered if, when she was younger, she thought about what her physical future was going to be like. I wondered if she would have done things differently had she known what potentially lay ahead for her, especially if she knew it was potentially avoidable.
And that got me thinking - how much time do any of us spend thinking about how our decisions today will influence our futures. Would we make the same decisions if we thought about how a decision today could ripple through our lives, going from a small choice today to a massive impact tomorrow. What would we do if we saw our future selves? Of course, we can't. But we can see other people's future selves.
Have a look at the elderly. If all goes right for us, that will be where we are in a decade or five, depending on how old you are today. Look at the differences in how they move, their builds, how for some their lives have worn them down. While there are lots of things that can happen that are out of our control, there are as many, if not more, that are in our control.
Think about what we eat. How often do we forgo nutrition for satiety? How many times do we walk past the salads and water to the pastries and sugar-laden drinks? An infrequent indulgence when the majority of what we consume is healthful and nutritious barely makes a difference; it forms a small ripple in a massive pond of accumulated wellness, and has almost no effect. Forgo the healthy food in favour of the pastries, chips and sugar-laden drinks and those small ripples combine to form massive waves that smash our bodies, leading us to diseases like Type II diabetes and coronary hear disease.
How often have you planned to exercise, or go for a walk, only to decide that a show on TV is more appealing, or that working late seems the best thing to do with the finite time we have on earth? Being inactive every now and then is fine, it gives the body time to recover and helps us to become stronger, faster, have more endurance or increased flexibility. Make a choice to be inactive for extended periods of time, and we are signing up for a life that will include reduced heart and lung function, loss of bone mineral density, joint problems, loss of fast twitch muscle fibres that keep our metabolism firing and help us to avoid falls. A life without regular physical activity is a prescription to be that old, frail person with the twisted frame who spends their life trying to avoid falls or with lung function so poor that walking around is tiring.
It's all about choices. Unless we are unfortunate enough to suffer from an illness or an injury that robs us of our ability to undertake regular physical activity or eat well, we become what we choose to embrace. If we choose to embrace nutrition and activity, we will age to be leaner, stronger and less likely to suffer from the ravages of time. We could be one of those people who are as active at 70 as they were at 20. If we choose to avoid nutritious foods, and forgo regular exercise, we put ourselves in the front row for an old age of suffering, of metabolic dysfunction, risk of broken bones from falls, and loss of confidence with movement. It's all about choices and the decisions you make, and the length of time over which you make them. I'm sure that the lady, lying on the grass, wasn't thinking about her choices throughout her life, and how they led to her needing that help from a stranger on that night. And I wonder - if she had seen that night played for her when she was 20 or 30, would she have done anything differently? It's all about choices...
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