Daniel Kunitz writes an interesting testimony (I can’t think of a better description for it) in the prologue of his book, Lift: Fitness Culture, from Naked Greeks and Acrobats to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors (HarperWave, 2016). He describes his life as a magazine editor living in New York City:
At our worst, my cohorts and I at the magazine emulated the wasted waif aesthetic of the times, the nineties, and gave no thought to improving or maintaining ourselves physically. We thought of ourselves as living the life of the mind…
p. 4.
He goes on for a page or more basically describing a dissolute lifestyle justified by a pseudo-intellectual glamour: “Like many people at that invulnerable age, I gave almost no thought to my body. Or worse, I had a romantic view of my sorry physical state: I was an artist, a bohemian; dissipation came with the role.”
If I suggest that many Christians, even many Christian pastors, make a similar mistake, it will seem insanely wrong. Christians know better than to engage in drunken parties. But the structure of young Kunitz’s world view has more applicability than oxycontin abuse.
For someone so enthralled with thought, I am in retrospect puzzled by my failure to reflect on the basic assumption on which my existence was based—that the mind and body sleep in separate bedrooms, leading their own lives. I might have considered that the brain is part of the body, that the two are in fact one… I’ve since come to understand that the old canard about choosing between the life of the body and the life of the mind (a bastardized version of the ancient and more valid distinction between the via activa and the via contemplativa, the active, political life versus the contemplative way) sets up a false distinction. It’s a bias based on the assumption that energy expended physically must be deducted from our mental account. Contrary to what I believed in high school, jocks need not be stupid, while eggheads, to the extent that they deny their physical lives, are fools.”
pp. 5, 6.