At the end of December 2021, Yuan Jingtian, a 40-year-old Sanya rice expert, passed away due to illness.
When we mourn for expert Yuan, we should also realise the importance of maintaining good health.
I remember reading this passage:
“We can’t control whether we will be rich or poor in the future, when our career will develop, and we can’t control what others say about us. But at least we can control our bodies and keep them in the best condition. Health care is a magic weapon to maintain the best state of the body. For adults, exercise is the most cost-effective way to maintain health. Adhering to exercise as the top way to maintain health is the homework we need to work hard to do.
Exercise, give back to our physical and mental state writer Liu Na wrote in “Flowers in Leisure”:
“Whether it is a better job, a better companionship, or a better way forward, we need to give ourselves the batteries of our bodies and hearts to be full of energy.” Exercise, like a battery that recharges our body and mind, can give us a healthy body and a good mental state. Academician Zhong Nanshan, who is already in his 80s, was still fighting on the front line and maintaining high-intensity work when the COVID-19 epidemic was raging. He not only relied on deep scientific research reserves, but also on a strong physique. Mr. Zhong’s good condition benefitted from his persistence in exercise. In the past few decades, he has exercised at least three times a week for more than an hour at a time, which has become his habit of thunder.
Grandpa Zhong Nanshan said, “Sportation plays a key role in my health. Life expectancy mostly does not depend on ageing and disease, but on a normal lifestyle. Nowadays, many young people, it is precisely because they have not developed the right lifestyle that their bodies will have various diseases and their organs will age faster. The sweat we shed for exercise will one day give back to us with a strong physique and a good mental state. At the same time, whether it is to drive away confusion or fight anxiety, exercise is one of the simplest and most practical methods. Actress Zheng Xiuwen once suffered from severe depression. For a period of time, she overeated, causing her figure to be completely disfigured. She is also getting more and more anxious, and her body and mind are on the verge of collapse. In order to get rid of her bad state and restore her body and mind to a healthy level, she followed the doctor’s advice and began to try moderate exercise. She began to run eight kilometres every day for more than ten years.
Although she is nearly 50 years old now, she is still well-proportioned and energetic, which vividly interprets the good story of “time never defeats beauty”. Persistence in sports will make us have a good physical and mental state, so that we can calmly resist the traces of time. A person’s life stage is not in the eyes of others, but in his own heart. We insist on exercising, not to get applause from others, but to broaden the length of our lives and the breadth of our hearts.
Exercise can make us develop the habit of self-discipline. Russian educator Ushinsky said, “Good habits are the capital deposited in the nervous system. This capital will continue to grow, and a person can enjoy its interest for the whole life.” Exercise allows us to develop the habit of self-discipline, so as to salvage more light and hope in life. Writer Haruki Murakami has been running for at least an hour every day since 1982. In the book What I Talk About When I Run, he records what he has been running for 36 years and what he has heard and felt every day. It takes a lot of perseverance to keep exercising, but Haruki Murakami felt, “I don’t want to run today, so I went to run. This is the way of thinking of long-distance runners.”
He gets up at 4 o’clock every day, writes for 5 hours, runs for 1 hour or swims for 1.5 hours in the afternoon, then reads, listens to music, and goes to bed at 9 p.m. Whenever I start to write novels, such work and rest have never changed. In the eyes of outsiders, the writing life in the village is a little regular and rigid, just like the Swiss mechanical watch, every minute. But Haruki Murakami himself knew that this habit of self-discipline benefitted him a lot. Writer Haruki Murakami wrote in his autobiographical novel: “For more than 30 years, I have never felt that writing is a hard work, and I have never encountered a low tide.”
Insistence on exercise has made him develop the habit of self-discipline. He lurked the habit of self-discipline into creation, thus having a reputation in the literary world. Although most of us, even if we insist on exercising, it will not change our lives dramatically, and we will still be the nameless in the vast sea of people. But insisting on exercising and getting up early will make us change in the subtle way: NetEase Cloud once had such a hot comment: “In fact, you can use early to stay up late instead of staying up late. The world is still sleeping, parents are still sleeping, and the boss is sleeping. The teacher is sleeping; the whole world is still sleeping, and you can watch It turns out that the light will always come; the people you care about will also wake up slowly, the world is still running slowly, and you will still have your own time. Sticking to exercise and getting up early will give us a new state to treat life, so that we can continue to write beauty in ordinary daily life. This is also the compound interest effect of self-discipline. Because time knows that there has never been any life, and there is only a lot of accumulation.
Exercise can make us more resilient.
Angela Duckerworth, an American psychology professor, concluded through research at West Point:
“The core element of a person’s success is not IQ, emotional intelligence, family background, or the so-called examination results, but the psychological resilience of the person, or anti-vulnerability.”
Exercise is a powerful weapon to exercise our psychological resilience.
Because of many sports, they have the characteristics of competition. As long as you participate in sports competitions, there will be wins and losses.
If you often participate in sports, you won’t care about the gains and losses of the moment, so it makes people more resilient.
In his New Year’s Eve speech in 2022, Luo Zhenyu talked about one thing about when he went to meet 60-year-old Yu Minhong:
“I asked him, do you usually exercise? He immediately got up and did 10 push-ups, and I was dumbfounded.
What I envy is not only his body, but also his energy. New Oriental’s teaching and training business was frustrated. It’s okay. They started all over again and worked on agricultural products.
Yu Minhong, 60 years old, can get up immediately and do 10 push-ups, which means that he should spend a lot of time on exercise. In fact, Yu Minhong has always attached great importance to sports. He once advocated in his speech that “every child should practice at least one sport.” As we all know, Yu Minhong is a very resilient person: he was admitted to the university after three college entrance examinations, and he also experienced all kinds of hardships in the process of starting a business in New Oriental.
In 2021, due to the implementation of the national “double reduction” policy, Yu Minhong’s New Oriental education and training business at the helm was frustrated. Yu Minhong was not discouraged, but took the lead in leading the teacher to transform into a live sales of agricultural products. Yu Minhong’s resilience in the face of difficulties, not discouraged and not retreating, comes from the tempering of daily exercise. Wang Xiaobo said, “Life is a slow process of being hammered.” Sports, in the face of the life of heavy mountains and rivers, we have the resilience and confidence to wait for the willows and flowers. Chen Ming, the champion of the strange talk, once said, “Nothing in the world is meaningful, and the meaning is given by people. And persistence itself is an extremely shining meaning.
Adhering to exercise is to protect our health and expand more possibilities for our life. At the beginning of the New Year in 2022, I hope that when we make a New Year’s wish, sports can be squeezed into our crowded wish list. I hope each of us can enjoy the fun of sports. Love sports, this is the way we adults should pursue health care.
