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Commentary

By Liz Quirin

Time to Begin Intentional, Healthy Living

A little bit of chocolate — dark chocolate that is — contributes to a healthy lifestyle. Believe it; I saw it on the internet so it must be true. At this point, and that’s really any point in a person’s life, living a healthy life is imperative. If you’re young, you can begin today, right now, to feel better by changing destructive habits: like eating too much of anything, including chocolate, or stopping too often at a fast food “restaurant” because you don’t have time to cook and get to the kids’ ball games, dance lessons, gymnastics or whatever else you can think of.

But healthy living entails so much more than eating right. It requires exercise, a positive attitude and time set aside for spiritual exercising of some sort. That could be reading, meditating or praying or possibly all three. To combine the physical and the spiritual, try taking your rosary on your walk for a little prayer before you turn on the Ipod. The walk goes just as fast with prayer as with music. Even better, walk with a friend and work on a relationship.
The key to any activity or relationship is making it intentional. More than a few years ago, I visited someone who lived in an intentional neighborhood — a place people chose to live because of others who also lived there. It was an interesting concept at the time, and it worked well because many of the people didn’t have close relatives so they took care of each other.

Being intentional about a lifestyle forces us to examine what we’re doing and what we want to stop or start doing, like exercise for example. I think about exercising often, but so far I have been unable to move my feet out the door to finish the “thought.” The same thing can be said about healthy eating. Just thinking about it won’t make it real. Believe me, I’ve thought about eating more fresh vegetables and fruits, marveling at people who do and watching more of the Food Channel on television than I ever had, but unless I go to the store and buy them, eating fictional vegetables remains only a good intention.

Living intentionally at any level makes us think about what we’re doing and how to make changes if we wish. Otherwise, we can drift more or less aimlessly from one activity to the next and suddenly, without realizing it, we discover time has escaped; people have grown up; we have grown older; and all our good intentions about living healthy, spiritually fulfilling lives have remained just that: unfulfilled dreams.
The good news, of course, is that we don’t have to wait for a certain time or place to begin to make changes, to move from decision to action. It is truly never too late to pull ourselves together and live fully and intentionally, and maybe we have to start over and over — and we can because every day a new opportunity presents itself. So, have a piece of chocolate and start right now.