The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning, but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life.
The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. (paragraph breaks added)
Source: Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton
I can only exercise until the crisis is past. When I fell off a roof and injured my back, I did back exercises for several months, until I seemed to have regained my strength. When I smashed my elbow, I did exercises for about six months, to regain movement. When I had a heart attack, I cut out fatty/sweet foods for… well… a while, until my arteries felt as though they had cleared themselves of cholesterol. Doing exercises seems so much like a waste of time, when I could be doing something more productive. I felt the same way about playing scales, back when I took music lessons, when I could be making melody instead.
Jim T
Jim T – Well, that’s about what I’ve been doing with physio for 20 years – working my way out of back attacks. And now shoulders and knees . . . We could start an Unhappy Exercisers Support Group, maybe, but who would do the maintenance work for that?