Keep moving - January 21, 2012

It was good we had snow yesterday. The dance performance was really helped by the white blanket... barely enough to sled on, but definitely enough to roll on, and jump on, and skid on your heels down the hill on. It was a fun performance, and at 15 minutes in 16°F temperatures with a bit of a breeze, it was not a minute too short.

Ingrid and I went to the dog park with Anya first. She bounded around in the woods and had a good time. We probably would have been happier temperaturewise if we had been bounding around like Anya, or dancing like Daniel. As it was, we started to lose feeling in our extremities.

The chechaquo in Jack London's story knew about keeping moving. Maybe that's one of the things we fail to take into account when we think of how people lived in an era before central heating and heated seats: They were doing more physical labor, even just to get around, than we are used to today. They did not stay especially still, if they could help it. Not in winter, outdoors.

It would be different if my walks with Anya were runs, real exertion on my part. Ingrid runs in most weathers, and she's comfortable enough even in the single digits (as long as there isn't much wind).

So one of the key ways we have become an indoor-oriented society, is in making our lives less and less about movement and physical work. We sit at desks or move relatively slowly through the aisles of a store. We rarely break a sweat unless we are exercising. We live longer lives, because manual labor breaks down the body through wear and tear more slowly, but those lives make us into less of an energy-producing furnace than our great-grandparents would have guessed.

The less wood we chop, the colder it feels outside.