Today is April 18th, and on this day in history, we celebrate National Exercise Day—a relatively young tradition that began in 2020, founded by Dr. Jeuse Bernard Saint-Fleur with a simple but profound mission: to remind us that movement is not just good for our bodies, but essential to our existence.
There’s something about the rhythm of footfalls on pavement that brings us back to ourselves. I was thinking about this on my dawn walk this morning, how the forest awakens gradually and without fanfare. The birds don’t analyze their morning songs; they simply sing them. The trees don’t contemplate stretching toward the sun; they simply grow. And yet we humans have somehow complicated this most natural act of movement.
The ancient Greeks understood this connection between body and soul. In their gymnasiums, physical training wasn’t separate from intellectual pursuit—it was the foundation of it. Marcus Cicero observed over two thousand years ago that “it is exercise alone that supports the spirits and keeps the mind in strength.” Isn’t it curious how we keep rediscovering what our ancestors already knew?
When you think about it, we’re just collections of atoms in constant motion. From the microscopic dance of our cells to the beating of our hearts, stillness is an illusion. Perhaps our modern malaise stems from forgetting that we are, at our core, creatures designed to move through space with purpose and joy.
I’ve noticed how different the world looks from a moving perspective. The same street I’ve driven down a hundred times reveals new details when walked. The same sky that forms the background of my daily commute becomes a canvas of shifting light when observed during a long run. Maybe movement isn’t just about health—maybe it’s about perception, about seeing the world as it truly is: dynamic, ever-changing, alive.
We’ve created a society that makes stillness the default and movement the exception. We sit in cars to reach buildings where we sit at desks, then return home to sit on couches. National Exercise Day isn’t just about counting steps or burning calories—it’s a gentle nudge toward reclaiming our birthright of motion, of remembering that we are not meant to be stationary objects.
So today, as the world turns and the planets continue their ancient orbits, perhaps the most cosmic thing we can do is to simply move—deliberately, joyfully, gratefully—and reconnect with the fundamental truth that we are beings in motion, passing briefly through a universe that never stands still.
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