From my earliest memories of high school, I recall loving to learn from a variety of sources trying to synthesize knowledge and experience.
Fitness has been a goal since the mid-70s when I moved from a job in manufacturing where I walked miles a day to a desk job in engineering where I walked feet per day. It happened in late summer. The first of April I went out to play softball and couldn’t run from home to first base. I joined the jogging craze the next day.
Now in my mid-70s I walk miles and resistance train. Like Yoga was developed thousands of years ago to train the body for sitting in meditation, the physical fitness helps my mental and spiritual fitness.
I use The Pump app to guide my program. It’s designed by Arnold Schwarzenegger and two guy who work closely with him. One just interviewed his boss.
Arnold Schwarzenegger Trained for 60 Years Without Counting a Calorie. Research Explains Why It Worked. The science of decision fatigue, goal complexity, and why simpler approaches to health are also the ones with the strongest evidence.
So I asked him: after sixty years of training, what has actually lasted? He gave me the answer, and I realized I already knew it. The basics. It’s always the basics that work best.
When we’re given too many choices, too much complication, too much nuance, we’re less likely to act on any of them and less satisfied when we do. When a health plan contains too many decisions — which supplement? which protocol? which meal timing window? — every micro-choice draws from the same limited cognitive well. You deplete that resource before you ever get to execution.
A lifetime of studying and teaching the Bible has taught me the same thing about spiritual life. I love studying the earliest Jesus followers. For 300 years, they sought to live out what Jesus taught. We can tell from some early letters that have been preserved that avoiding the too human pitfalls sometimes complicated life.
The answer invariably returned to Jesus’ two commands. You shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself.
Period. Full stop.
Everyone who tries to complicate those commands with more options and decisions and complexity have strayed from the simple path. Physicists call it first principles.
(Oh, how am I doing? And how are you doing?)
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Gary Mintchell
Faith Venture 