Before going to sleep, I have been doing twenty sit-ups on my bed. My face contorts and my stomach pulls, but strangely, it feels good. Whatever happened that day, after I raise myself twenty times, my heart comes back to life.
I started receiving personal training a few years ago. It began with Pilates sessions with a teacher who had trained in ballet and went on to sessions at the gym, so I think it has been about three years. Once exercising became a habit, I felt stifled if I did not move my body. I take frequent walks along the Han River, try the exercise equipment there, and enjoy riding Ttareungi when commuting. I also started running. I like the exhausted state I feel while running and gasping for breath. This May, I badly injured my face and had no choice but to stop PT. The alternatives I found then have now overtaken PT and become my main forms of exercise. What is interesting is that I am becoming more and more interested in exercises I can do with my own body. Movements that are good for anyone, that need no one else’s support, and that are possible at any hour.
Cha In-pyo spoke about three habits for living life well. Reading, writing, and exercise. There are many ways to do all of these things: by spending money, by finding a teacher, by doing them with others. But in the end, I think what matters is reaching the point where one naturally does them on one’s own, even alone. And we never know when that beginning will arrive.
#Reading and writing
I began reading long texts in earnest just as I was turning seven. On days when my father went out, he would often come home with two or three books from Kyobo Book Centre in Gangnam, carried in a yellow envelope. Biographies of figures such as Shin Saimdang, Yi I, and King Sejong were the beginning of my reading. At the back of the books, there were pages for writing book reports, and I would fill those pages with crooked little impressions. After writing a book report, I felt somehow proud. It was my first experience of writing. After that, reading and writing became habits I could do well alone, and from my mid-thirties, doing them with others became natural too.
#Exercise
In elementary school, I played rubber-band skipping very often, and after transferring to a school in the countryside, I rode a bicycle to and from school and sometimes went hiking. I was the kind of person who liked moving my body. Exercise began with riding a bicycle. But when I was in my second year of middle school, I badly injured my right arm during a group tug-of-war. I should have continued going to the hospital, but because I stopped physiotherapy, I have lived my whole life with a weak arm. I lost confidence in all kinds of exercise. In my twenties, I became interested in the gym, yoga, and swimming, and in my thirties, horseback riding, but I could not carry them through to the end. Then I began PT in earnest and focused on rehabilitating my right arm. Only after I watched my right shoulder come into balance with the left did exercise seem to become mine. A state where I could do it naturally, even alone.
All three are useful for lifting the heart and lifting life. I think these three shine less as grand goals for becoming a great person than at the points where the heart runs low and hard things have to be lived through. Something that was a major event in the past can be nothing much today, and a heart that was uneasy yesterday can be indifferent by today. It is hard to contain in language the full value of reading, writing, and exercising as three ways of returning oneself to oneself. If there is a state I want to maintain in life, it is to feel uneasy and uncomfortable when I am not doing these three things.