NATURAL EXERCISE

Yesterday, during the time I spent gardening, firewooding and rebuilding the stone wall, I estimate that I did a minimum of 100 squats and stands (planting and weeding), 20 leaps across rows, 50 heavy lifts (carrying rocks, wheelbarrowing, sacks of compost), 25 toe-touches (planting seeds), 50 left and 50 right lateral pulls (tilling), 50 overhead lifts (stacking firewood), 100 shovelings (dirt of stonewall and garden), a half hour of chainsawing and an hour of woodsplitting with a 3.2 kg splitting maul, all while walking and climbing a few kilometers in the process. Wonder if there's a gym I didn't have to travel to that could give me all that amidst actual birdsong in fresh mountain air and sunshine, for free, plus fresh organic vegetables and a new stone wall...

TIP-TOP OFFICE EXERCISES

This program of simple desk and cubicle exercises will start you on your way to office health, both physical and mental, no matter where you work:

The Münch

While pressing your elbows down upon your desk, press your hands to the side of your face as hard as you can and scream silently, making deep use of the diaphragm. Repeat until exhausted, once each workday morning and afternoon. When after 20 years you become fully unraveled, you can begin The Uber Münch.

The Desk Crunch

While adamantly seated in your chair, force your elbows downward upon your desk while pressing your knees outward against the inner walls of the desk as hard as you can, for as long as you can. Repeat until exhausted. After some years, you will succeed in crumpling your desk into a tangle of bent synthetic materials and can advance to the next exercise level. Repeat twice daily, in combination with The Münch, for maximum effectiveness.

The Wall Hammer

If you work in a cubicle and have already crunched your desk, you are ready to advance to the wall. Several times a day, stand facing any wall of your cubicle and pound on it as hard as you can alternately with fists, elbows, hips, knees and feet while doing The Münch, until you begin to make some dents in your containment. If your boss comes running, so much the better; you can vary your regimen with the exercise series called The Boss Hammer. That will get results even more quickly. Whenever other employees come to see what the commotion is, introduce them to your exercises. They will thank you, for this regimen relieves collective tension, making you a better, more relaxed and productive employee, while helping to shatter that glass floor, enabling your plummet to freedom. Along the way, you can practice such advanced exercises as

On the Carpet - turn criticism into coliseum!
The Rat Race - win this one by running backwards!
The Dog-Eat-Dog - Be better than dog food!
Career Moves - Terminal checkmate is the goal here!
Major Overhead - Start wielding the Sword of Damocles!
Number Crunching - No one can stop those ruthless jaws!
Downsizing - Your bosses will be half their original size!

Once you've completed this series, you can start on our full range of Street Exercises!

IMAGINE

Imagine you're a grandfather my age and your daughter takes an afternoon off to visit some friends for the first time in a long while, and on the same afternoon your wife goes off for a few appointed hours to practice yoga, leaving you alone on a hot August day in a mountainside house with no car and three granddaughters aged 7, 4 and 4 years whose every request must be honored, in order that it may cease.

While you're at it, imagine also that you have a large editing job to complete by tomorrow morning and that every now and then, while the three are engrossed for the few minutes possible - for example in energetically drawing large, bright images with colored felt-tipped pens on small pages atop your unmarked oak floor - you sneak upstairs to do some quiet typing until before too long a small shadow comes creeping upward to stand beside you and ask, "What are you doing? Can I use the bubble gun?"

Then it's out on the deck (more fun than typing) refereeing turns with the bubble gun, which soon runs out of bubble juice, so you try to make some more over the kitchen sink from dish detergent etc. with six small arms hanging from your own so as to help you finish faster, then back out and one girl blows bubbles while the other two chase the rainbow orbs into the garden, where the girls begin sampling herbs and trying out the garden hose, it works very well, wets the firewood, the girls and an upstairs room nicely, so you go into the garden to supervise, then they get thirsty, then hungry, and a full half-hour has passed already, only 4 or more hours to go.

At some point in the long blur, one of the 4-year-olds points to your midriff and says "Is there a baby in there?" referring to those few pounds you've only just begun enjoying as the first small bit of fat on your body in all your life, the look on her face perhaps implying that this non-stop exercise is just what you need. Yet through all this, somewhere inside you, in a place not quite accessible at the moment, you love every relentless minute of it. Ah, how we discover new reaches of the heart. Imagine.