Havre de Grace.-- In winter especially, when the days are short and there's so much to do while the light lasts, I sometimes feel I'm constantly in motion.
On a farm, you can walk a hundred yards in any direction and find three things that ought to be fixed. This is the season to make those repairs. There are also more daily chores now, although not as many as there will be soon.
The weather having been mild most of the fall, the older cows are still out in our hill field. This means they don't need to be fed every day. Until the snow starts flying or they get ready to start calving, they won't require much more than a daily visit. But there are endless ordinary little jobs to do all the same.
Split and carry firewood. Shovel the ashes out of the stove. Fill the bird feeder. Clean the gutters and the downspout. Get the burrs out of the dog. Feed the barn cats. The secret to getting everything done is not to hurry, but to keep on going.
Yet staying steadily in motion can be addictive. If you're used to being on the move throughout the day, it's hard to sit quietly without fidgeting, even in the evening with a nice fire in the stove. You get to feel that if you're idle too long, bad things will happen. And you can feel time slipping away.
At this time of year I find myself remembering the advice of the philosopher Satchel Paige, who in a 1953 Collier's article imparted six enduring rules for those seeking to defer old age. They were:
1) Avoid fried foods which angry up the blood.
2) If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.
3) Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.
4) Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain't restful.
5) Avoid running at all times.
6) Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you.
The first two rules aren't for me. If my stomach disputes me, I generally put something in it, especially fried foods, and then it quiets down. But the others, especially the famous last one, I try to follow. And the best way to avoid looking back is to keep moving forward, even at a shuffle.
What'll kill you is too much time in a chair. A man named Pete Egoscue, who says he's an "anatomical functionalist," wrote in the New York Times last Sunday about what happens to the bodies of sedentary people. Muscles, without regular exertion, simply shut down.
"Modern living does not provide enough motion and -- most important -- enough of the proper motion to keep the body fully fit, fully functional and pain-free," says Mr. Egoscue. Even trained athletes fall apart in mid-career because "they've been running a motion deficit since infancy."
Well, big surprise. Most Americans, including children, seem to spend most of their time engaged in passive occupations, whether in front of an interactive computer or an old-fashioned television. No wonder they're fat. No wonder they eventually find, to their and their lawyers' indignation, that incredibly modest exertion at home or at work sometimes causes them pain.
In an acerbic passage in "Alongshore," one of the best 1994 books to come to my attention, the historian John R. Stilgoe observes an 8-year-old boy on an ocean beach. The boy whines that the smell of the sea and the seaweed make him sick, that people might have peed in the ocean, that a swimming pool would be preferable.
Mr. Stilgoe sees this dismal creature as a symbol. "The boy sitting on the beach, afraid to walk across three feet of dried seaweed, must concern every beachcomber, every environmentalist. He is the new American child, the child afraid to accept physical risk, the child unfit for risk." By the time he's 16, while he may wear fashionable surfing attire to the water's edge, he'll be fat, soft -- and at risk.
Not so long ago in America, Mr. Stilgoe recalls, "physical exertion -- not exercise, not sports -- seemed the gateway to making young people competent in their bodies, proud of their bodies, able to play and work hard, join the military, raise children, stay healthy -- and explore the coastal realm." But today's beach is "peopled by overweight, inactive kids whose obesity and passivity presage illness, injury and early death."
That was morbid of Professor Stilgoe, but I understand. It's the kind of thought that comes to somebody who's spent -- wasted? -- a couple of sunlit hours sitting in front of a computer, as I just have. But motion dispels morbidity, and perhaps the professor felt better after he went for a swim. I know I'll be more cheerful after I get moving again.
"The body isn't fragile," said Mr. Egoscue, the anatomical functionalist, unintentionally paraphrasing Mr. Paige, the pitcher and philosopher. "It isn't broken. But without enough motion -- proper motion -- we are all slowly dying in place."
Peter A. Jay is a writer and farmer.