Let's say that for a few days or weeks you were to hire a Hollywood makeup artist, throw on a convincing fat suit and some awful makeup and masquerade as a fatter, remarkably unattractive version of yourself. Would it change the way the world interacts with you? Would it influence the way you feel about yourself?

The answer to both questions is a solid yes, and most likely you would be shocked by the degree to which it would happen.

Over the course of my life, thanks to a combination of military service and a penchant for travel to countries with less than obsessive levels of food and water sanitation standards, I've managed to more or less destroy my body and have to start over from the basis of a skinny-fat weakling.

And that's not to mention the two or three week period which I now look back on as the ugliest time of my life.

Why does no one admit his failings? Because he's still deep in them. It's the person who's awakened who recounts his dream, and acknowledging one's failings is a sign of health.Seneca – Letters from a Stoic

The conditions of any interaction between oneself and another can be broken down into two categories: Their actions and yours. You can only control the latter.

Something that I have been working on is upon every negative thing that comes up in my life; when a relationship goes poorly, when a workout doesn't go well, when an article gets kicked back from an editor with the words "total re-write," I stop myself mentally from tumbling into anger, excuses or resentment. (I mean really, how does someone survive long enough into adulthood to come into my gym and strike themselves with a sledgehammer?)

One has the capability to control the impact of outside elements, including other people, by developing a sense for ascertaining each person or things unique temperament. From that basis one may predict future behavior and either steer interactions in a favorable direction or choose not to allow into ones life those whom would affect it negatively. Those things still fall into the category of your own actions.

We’re all born with near-perfect postural alignment. Watch a toddler walk, stand, reach overhead and squat and you’ll see tremendous mobility and safe strong joints.

It’s pretty much downhill from there.

North American culture has us spending an inordinate amount of time in the sitting position. A great deal of time and effort goes into preventing us from expending, well, time and effort when it comes to moving around in our daily lives. Items on shelves are always within arms reach, if we have to move very far we hop on an escalator, an elevator or get in our cars; and a job that involves spending much time on one’s feet or lifting something heavier than twenty pounds is considered “strenuous.”

Over the course of a lifetime, people tend to develop postural imbalances. Much of this is due to the chair-bound culture. The head tends to drift forward into the dreaded “turtle head” posture; the lower back sways into a position known as lordosis, the upper back hunches forward, the scapulae wing out, the upper arms rotate internally and the palms end up facing backwards like Fred Flintstone, the knees get wobbly and the hips get tight, and the ankles become stiff and crunchy.

No part of the body functions in isolation. The entire body is connected through a variety of means.

A Symphony, Not a Solo

Muscles do not contract individually; they do so in a synchronized fashion, like a symphony. If you bend down and pick your kid off the floor, a chain of muscular contractions from your feet all the way through your arms occurs in order to make that happen. When the body has a postural imbalance, these “kinetic chains” are forced to be directed through an inefficient and potentially harmful series of muscular contractions.

28,251 Days

There are 28,251 days in the average human lifespan. On my shelf right now, I have a notebook with a piece of paper in it. The paper has a big square divided into tiny little blocks. It's 52 blocks wide and 80 blocks tall. At the top left corner my birthday is written. On the bottom right is the same date, eighty years later. Every week I mark off a block. I talked about this whole concept in depth in my last post.

Those 28,251 days that we each get? I've already used up about a third of them. That’s 9,000 days, with no guarantee that I'll even get that many more. 

Every once in a while I enjoy talking to old people and getting them to tell stories. Some day, granted we don't kill ourselves off somehow along the way, we're all going to be in their place. They all say that life flew right by.

Their most vivid memories are the day they met their wife or husband, the first thing their kid said and the time when he was sixteen and drove the car into the living room. They remember their own childhood and the stories of the relationships, friendships, laughter and sadness they've had. The highs and the lows. 

I am haunted by the idea of time passing by unused. The idea that I could look back on a period of my life and remember nothing significant about it terrifies me.

I know a self-made millionaire who was homeless at one point in his life. I saw a guy finish BUD/S Hell Week with a broken leg. Many of the most successful businesses in America started with less than 10,000 dollars in capital. Nike was once nothing more than some guy selling shoes out of the back of his car. Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, lived in an empty incinerator for several months.

While traveling overseas, I met numerous people who sold successful businesses or walked away from lucrative jobs and everything else they owned in order to leave behind a life that had all the accoutrements but just didn't make them happy. They started anew in places like Kenya, New Zealand and Costa Rica and wake up every day to a fulfilling life.

I had the privilege of getting to know a man who once owned a successful small business in Colombia but knew that his future there was eventually limited. Along with a friend, he decided to go to the United States. By walking. Along the way, he was robbed of everything he owned and left to die with nothing but his underwear in the desert in Southern Mexico. His friend was cut in half by a freight train. When he finally made his way to the states, he got caught. When the Border Patrol guy asked him why he was sitting quietly in his cell and not making a ruckus like everyone else, he replied that it was all only a game.

"You won this time, my friend. Maybe next time, I win."

Jump in. Youll find a way across.

Throughout most of my two and a half years going through Naval Special Warfare selection training, swimming was my Achilles heel. My intense dislike for it was equaled only by my monumental lack of talent at it.

That was all part of the plan, really. A challenge was my goal and throwing myself into something that I was inherently bad at seemed like a good way to find that. I didn't even learn how to swim until boot camp. I’d never be fully prepared for this anyway, and if I didn’t do it now, I probably never would.

During the first week of boot camp, the same day as the basic swim test, a series of four videos are shown about each of the special programs available to volunteers. Along with a handful of others, I raised my hand, put my name on a list and volunteered for selection.

Shortly thereafter I sat shivering on a small blue tile in a muggy, chlorine-scented locker room amongst rows of other candidates. My arms were wrapped around my knees, pulling them to my chest. I wasn't cold. I was shaking because the next six years of my life depended on my ability to pass this test.