I wrote about my grand-grandfather’s wisdom in the context of intuitive eating. I think it was him who inspired an attitude in my father I would like to share with you. My father tries to live by this mantra: “Ništa mi nije teško”, meaning, “Nothing is hard for me to do”. My dad grew up in a village where everyone had to do hard physical work to survive. And strange as it may sound, he fell in love with it – he has been returning to his village since I know him – next to working a hard full time job and raising the family – working the land (he has a big orchard) and raising honey bees as his hobby. He is now retired for more than a decade, spending most of the year outside, in his garden, and with his bees. In his seventies, he is one of the healthiest and fit men I know.

He’s been trying to pass his passion to me since I was a boy. Only now I am beginning to understand him. On the one hand, I understand his need to create, to literally see the fruit of his labor grow and ripe. But I also start to understand his strategic decision to lead an active lifestyle. It goes beyond making him feel good: it is a way of life. His mantra – “nothing is hard for me to do” is the cornerstone principle of this approach to life. He doesn’t try to optimize his work by minimizing the number of movements he makes – he even intentionally does things the harder way just to move more. For example, only recently he decided to buy a lawn mower, he used to maintain an almost perfect lawn using an old scythe. He used to say there isn’t a better exercise. He taught me how to do that (there is a lot of skill required actually), and he was right about the exercise effect. He doesn’t arrange his things so they are super easy to fetch – he sometimes intentionally gets up more times to go and get what he needs. He has built movement in his life.

This is a really important point for me, and I’ll try to explain how I see that by framing it in my experience. I’ve been resenting chores and work that awaits me after work, thinking it’s not fair, looking forward to being inactive. All along I was wondering why I felt so lifeless and drained in the evenings – blaming work for it. Recently my dear wife was recovering from a surgery, and I had to take all the house work on me. As I had a busy period on my work too I decided that the only way this could work is if I would adopt a continuous cleaning approach – do a bit every morning and evening before and after work. I decided to approach this with my father’s attitude: I will take pride and joy in what I do rather than resent it – regardless of how insignificant it may seem. Just writing this made me realize how skewed my attitude towards physical work is. And after doing it right for a couple of days I started to see the light: you get active; you get the work done, and look: things become better because of what you’ve done. How could I have hated that?

There is one more aspect to my father’s choice I’d like to discuss: being with nature. He spends his days outside, in the sun, wind, surrounded by trees, ground, birds, bees – studying their behavior, and becoming a crucial part of their development by taking gentle care of them. There is nothing more relaxing for me than being surrounded by green. Here too, he managed to integrate nature in his life completely.

It is so exciting how a paradigm shift can make us see things in a new way. Life is full of lessons, if we open ourselves to them. With that, I will shut down my computer, and cycle off to a wooded park to do a session of yoga. The weather is marvelous.