What is important to people? What do they look forward to? What do they focus on? What do they try to keep up to date with on a daily basis? The Kardashians? Other celebrities? Sports? TV shows? Their car? Travel? Shopping? Hobbies? Family? Exercise? Church? Business (either their own or their employers)? And, many more.
There are many things that each of us attempt to devote our time and energy to daily. They bring us joy and satisfaction (except when our sports teams lose). We trained ourselves to exclude many other things at the expense of what we choose to be primary in our lives.
We may exclude exercise because of various reasons. We may exclude saving money because we need things right now. We might not know the true value of money. We may not have been trained to save and invest wisely. We may exclude family at times thinking that our jobs are more important in the short term. We make choices.
Yet, one of the choices we rarely make is to our health. It’s always something we’ll worry about down the road. We focus on everything else until we have time to think about our health. We raise our families till they have left home. We have achieved that empty next status. We now see our parents beset with degraded fitness, well-being or limited physical/mental condition.
It’s a bit of a wake-up call – the kids are gone and our parents don’t have much time left on this earth. We make vows to exercise more and eat better. Yet, this same attitude towards our physical and mental being could have been started earlier in our lives – we just weren’t trained to put health on our list of important things in our lives.
Why? Cost? Time? Competing aspects of our lives? Lots of reasons. Yet, which one really and truly is important (at least in the Top Five) in the big scheme of things?