None Of Us Really Move Any More

There are five of you in this house and you are in four different rooms.

It is eight in the evening. Everybody is fine. Nobody is in trouble, nobody is unhappy, dinner was fine, the day was fine. Five people, four rooms, and there is no particular reason for any of it.

You noticed it tonight, for some reason, and it landed harder than it might have.

Because you cannot remember when this started.

There was a period when this family was physically together and physically moving. You went places. The children went out of the door and came back muddy. Somebody was always trying to get somebody else to come and look at something outside. And you could not put a date on when that stopped, or a reason, because there was not one. It thinned out, the way things do.

So let me say what this site is and what it is not, right at the front, because the word fitness is on the door and it will make you brace.

Nothing here is about anybody's body and how it is judged. Not once, in any of the seven, not even to reassure you. That is a different subject, it belongs somewhere else, and if it were the subject here it would poison every article on this site.

And nothing here is a program. There is no plan, no six weeks to anything, and I will not be counting for you.

This is about a household being in the same place, using their bodies, for ten minutes, together. That is the whole subject. The moving is almost the excuse.

Two are better than one

There is a line in Ecclesiastes about company that gets quoted at weddings, and read plainly it is far more practical than that.

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. (Ecclesiastes 4:9, King James Version)

Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor.

Notice the reason given, because it is not the one people usually supply. It does not say two are better because company is pleasant. It says because of what happens to the labor.

You have a household with other people in it, and the written word calls that an advantage rather than an obstacle. Ecclesiastes 4:9 argues from bodies and from work instead of from feelings, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a second person in a hallway into the reason a front door opens.

You have tried the other thing, and everybody has. A person on their own, tired, at eight in the evening, does not go, and the not going becomes one more small entry in the record of things you meant to do.

The whole passage is about work: two people working, one falling and the other lifting him up. It is an argument about effectiveness, made in physical terms, about bodies.

And the specific claim is that the same effort produces more when there is somebody alongside.

You are able to do together what neither of you will do alone, and it has never once been a matter of one of you being stronger than the other. The Spirit of God is the one who gets a household out of four rooms, and Ecclesiastes 4:9 puts the reward in the labor of two rather than in the pleasure of company.

That is not sentiment. Anybody who has done a hard task with another person knows it is true, and knows the difference was not that the other person helped much. You have felt that difference yourself, on some job you would never have finished alone and did finish because somebody was standing there.

But a thing arranged with somebody else in the house happens, because there is now a second person who knows about it.

The unit is one other person

Here is the practical thing, and it is the whole design of this article.

Do not try to move the family.

You are able to take one person to the end of the street, and that has never once required the whole household to agree first. The Spirit of God is the one standing with a parent in a doorway who is about to ask, and Ecclesiastes 4:9 makes its case about two rather than about a crowd.

There are five of you, and getting five people out of the door at eight in the evening is a project. It needs persuasion and negotiation, somebody will say no, the refusal becomes the event of the evening, and nobody will attempt it again for a month.

So the unit is not the family. It is you and one other person.

One. Whoever is nearest, whoever is easiest, whoever happens to be in the room. It genuinely does not matter which one, and picking the hardest one in order to prove something is a way of guaranteeing failure.

You were the one who noticed the four closed doors tonight, and noticing has never once been the same thing as failing. It is written in Ecclesiastes that the good reward belongs to the labor of the two, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the noticing in a person before they can name what they noticed.

And you do not announce it as a new family practice. Nobody says we are going to start doing this. That sentence turns a walk into a policy, a policy invites resistance, and children can hear a policy through a wall.

Say: come to the end of the street with me. That is the whole of it.

What happens after that is not your business tonight. It might be that nobody else notices. It might be that somebody asks where the two of you went. Nothing is being founded here. This is one thing done once, and the reason it works is that it cannot fail in any way that costs anything.

The end of the street and back

So here is the assignment.

Walk to the end of the street and back with one other person in the house.

You are not trying to achieve anything with your body tonight, and the worth of these six minutes has never once depended on what they produce. It is written in Ecclesiastes that the reward sits in the labor of the two, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present with two people walking to a corner and turning round.

The end of the street. Not a walk. Not around the block, not up to the park, not thirty minutes. The end of the street and back, which in most places is about six minutes.

I know how small that is. It is small on purpose, and here is the reasoning.

Six minutes will not change anybody and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What six minutes does is get two people out of a house together, in the air, side by side rather than facing each other, which is the arrangement in which people say things they would not say across a table.

You have permission to let six minutes be six minutes, and it has never once needed to become a talk in order to be worth doing. The Spirit of God is the one who does the quiet work in a household, and Ecclesiastes 4:9 puts the good reward in the labor rather than in what gets said during it.

Go tonight if you can, or tomorrow. Coats on, out, down, back.

And do not fill it with anything. Do not use it to have the conversation you keep meaning to have. Do not ask how school is going. The moment it has an agenda it becomes a summons, they will feel it, and next time they will not come.

Just walk to the end of the street.