If you managed to plod through 40 years of working in someone else’s business, raised a family, lowered a friend and survived a war with all your limbs intact, you are privileged.

If you can still put one foot in front of the other, not be hooked up to a dialysis machine, aren’t dragging an oxygen bottle through a supermarket, haven’t been told to get your affairs in order and are not locked up in a nursing home while the Social Security Administrationwaits to get you off the books, you are privileged.

Every footstep is a celebration of the miracle you are moving around in. A human movement system that even the brightest minds on the planet haven’t managed to completely figure out. Yet!

Every day free of a hospital visit, a new prescription, a walker or a bad diagnosis is cause for celebration.

Exercising your gift is an act of gratitude.

When we see examples of human wreckage all around us every minute of every day and we are not among those walking wounded, it’s humbling.

The next time you are lacing up and thinking it’s a chore to shake it up for 30 or 40 minutes out of your allotted 1440, try to think of it as a celebration and an opportunity to be grateful for such good fortune.

It’s a privilege to be able to move around and shake that thing. It’s a privilege to be free of pain and disease.

Exercise your privilege.

Soon you won’t have to worry about feeling old, you’ll just have to worry about thinking old. 🙂