We’re up in the North Carolina mountains for a few days. In a fit of insanity, I agreed to let each of my kids bring a friend. Toby’s friend is . . . a girl. So we have two 12 year-old girls, a 15 year-old boy, and his girlfriend. I really don’t know what I was thinking!
In our efforts to keep everyone occupied and supervised, we’ve been dragging them around to all the local touristy hotspots. Lee grew up in Miami, but like a lot of other Floridians, his family always headed for the cooler mountains in the summertime. He’s been coming up here ever since he can remember, so he gets kind of a kick out of taking the children to the places he used to go when he was a kid.
We went up to Sliding Rock one day, which is exactly what it sounds like: a big natural water slide in the river. Kids have been sliding down that rock, shivering and tearing up their pants, for many, many years. Our crowd did several cycles of wait, slide, shriek, splash, then they’d had enough, so we drove up the road to Looking Glass falls.
This is such a popular spot that the park service has built a long set of stairs down from the road so that people can get down to the bottom of the falls to swim and take pictures. The kids went slipping and sliding around on the rocks, but they were too cold and tired to really get wet again at that point.
Lee made an interesting comment, though, as we were heading back to the car. He said that he could remember, when he was in his teens and twenties, dreading having to walk down to the water, because he always knew he’d get winded on the stairs going back up. The stairs–these stairs–
don’t even faze him now. He just marched right on up to the top without even thinking about it (we were only a bit distracted by Toby clambering around on some very high, precarious rocks to take pictures of his girlfriend in the river below).
I’ve been thinking about that comment ever since (as we’ve been running around keeping up with all these kids) and I realized that those stairs are the tangible, concrete benefit of this heart-healthy lifestyle. We don’t see his arteries every day; we don’t think all the time about cholesterol tests or ejection fraction or blockage reversal. What we are aware of, always, are things like energy level and ease of movement and getting the most out of every day.
There are lots of you out there who haven’t had a heart attack–yet. But you’re already suffering from the here and now limitations that accompany heart disease, or even just a generally unfit lifestyle: shortness of breath, low energy, all kinds of aches and pains and physical discomforts. I know it’s difficult to get motivated about improving the health of a heart that you can’t really see and may not even understand, but being able to go up and down stairs without running out of breath? That’s a real, measurable Good Thing that will make your life better every day. Lee is the living proof.
Now, if we could just convince this teenager to take everyday health and safety as seriously . . .
