Fitness & Lifestyle | ILLUMINATION
A Little Pain Now or A Lot of Pain Later?
The choice you make is free to you, but will you experience pain from your short term decisions or pain from your long term decisions?
Whether you choose to experience a little pain now, or put it off until later to experience more pain, life is painful. What I mean is that people go through physical and mental pain all the time, but making good choices for your health could make life less painful and enjoyable in the long term rather than more painful and difficult in the long term.
Most people decided that they’d rather enjoy their life when they’re young to the maximum, by eating unhealthy foods, avoiding exercising enough, and continuing their bad habits that are hurting their mental health.
What they don’t see from this shortsighted way of living is that those bad habits will come back to get them in both physical and mental pain later on.
The thing is, these decisions that they make typically don’t hurt anyone except themselves.
Everyone’s parents or grandparents have told them that as they grow older, they’ll start getting back pain, neck pain, mental pain, and everything else under the sun because of aging. In our current culture, this is practically expected for everyone. What they don’t tell you is that if you make better decisions when you’re young and take advantage of the energy and powerful body you still have, your body will end up aging slower than your friends’ bodies do.
You’ll very likely experience less body pain if you exercise enough daily, eat enough healthy foods, and give up bad habits that only damage your body over time and cause it to age faster.
My grandfather learned this lesson better than anyone else I know. The reason why I say this isn’t because he made bad life choices and experiences a tremendous amount of pain now, but because he learned from 2020 what losing the ability to continue your healthy habits does over time.
In 2020, when the pandemic began, he and my grandmother stayed in their home as much as possible to avoid getting sick from other people. They understood that people of their age were most vulnerable to the virus, so they avoided being around people who could potentially get them sick.
My grandfather understood that he had to be safe, but deep down he knew how he really wanted to continue going out to jog or walk in the city of São Paulo in Brazil.
He wasn’t giving up his healthy habit of jogging every day; he was in fear of getting sick because of it. After avoiding his habit for more than two years, in 2022 his legs must have weakened because he started feeling terrible pains that he had never felt before, and it became difficult just to walk in the tiny apartment that he and my grandmother share because of the pain.
Since then, he’s been trying his best to walk as much as possible in the mornings outside of his apartment on a short square path that is near it to slowly and consistently improve his leg, so maybe one day it will stop hurting so much.
It was the consistency of these two habits, either walking or not walking, that have both saved him from experiencing pain in old age and caused him pain in old age.
Though my grandfather now struggles to walk outside, I will continue his tradition throughout my life and make sure to never stop my habit of jogging outside at least once every week in honor of his persistence to continue walking to heal his legs over time.
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