Topic: Health Choices
The trick is to nurture the structure. Let it be your calming force.
The vast majority of life, with healthy people, is devoted to establishing and maintaining structure. This means healthy habits. Things as basic as sleep, grooming, nutrition, exercise, and work. All of it laced with fun and happiness, whenever possible.
Kids, of course, would like to have all of life being fun and irresponsibility. Forget the boring stuff! So parents have to find ways of coaxing their offspring into experiencing delight and intrinsic rewards in the tasks that are required for structure.
Hopefully, as we mature, we learn to build fun into the habits of routine, wherever possible. Watch a healthy bunch of senior citizens with health challenges and disabilities. You'll find them doing just this.
I noticed that even in Africa, where things seem to be extremely routine and basic needs hard to come by, people are amazingly good at this. Singing and dancing just permeate the culture, with such meaning! All without instruments, most of the time.
In the Western world, especially in the United States, we seem to require gadgets to save us from the "drudgery" of the structure. I know: I had to wash for a few months with a ringer washer in Africa, before my automatic arrived. I thought it was just awful while any African would have considered that ringer a luxury! Most of them never saw a rubboard, like the one my grandmother used when I was very small, leaning over her bathtub to do the laundry--and, in case, you haven't seen one lately, you'll find one in most garden-variety museums (go ask if you don't get the picture immediately).
The second trick to finding fulfillment in life, beyond basic health, is not so much searching for ways to save our atrophied muscles or brains from further development. It's in learning to sometimes create the chaos.
No, I'm not contradicting myself. Think on these things.
