Swirling Incentive

Like many Americans, I am too sedentary for my own good. Mine was mainly an office job, I sat all the way to the city on the BART train and, although My Beloved and I have gone through periodic fits of getting up in the pre-dawn dark to punish ourselves before work by tramping up and down our hilly town streets, we quickly gave them up in favor of vigorous TV viewing.

One of my aims in retirement is to get daily exercise both to trim the caboose and to enjoy the fresh air and sunshine but it's a hard habit to start. Once I'm out there striding along, it feels good, and you'd think that alone was incentive enough but on some mornings, especially cold, foggy ones, the spirit is weak.

On those days, thankfully rare, I fall back on the incentive of morning buns. Morning buns, spirals of cinnamon in flaky pastry, are available at our local Starbucks, which is down a steep hill from our house. The coffee isn't great and the calories may negate most of the good the walking is doing, but the incentive of a latte and a morning bun is enough to get me out the door and tackling the hill to bring back a reward for having Just Done It.

There's a kind of rightness to the idea that the morning buns are helping to reduce my aging buns.