#51 Understanding Joe

"By all means never fail to get all the sunshine and fresh air you can."

Joseph H. Pilates, Return to Life Through Contrology

When did you last stand in sunlight and have nowhere else to be?

I asked myself that on a Thursday morning in late May, somewhere in the middle of a two-and-a-half-hour run through one of the most beautiful parts of my home region in Lower Austria. The light was extraordinary, the kind that makes you physically greedy for it.

And I was completely alone out there.

Just the landscape, the light, and a quiet feeling in my stomach that took a while to name.

The fields were not empty. The farmers were there, but sealed inside their enormous tractors, perched high in their cabins, rolling slowly across the land without ever touching it. In the field, yet distant from it. Present, but not quite there.

I noticed that detail very specifically that morning.

And it stayed with me.

There was this feeling I don’t have a clean word for. Somewhere between awe and a quiet grief. A moment where something beautiful sits in front of you, and it feels almost unreal that so few people are here to see it.

I have lived in Bali long enough to understand a different relationship to this. When good surf comes, people rearrange their entire day. The ocean becomes the priority, and the structure of work folds around it rather than the other way around. Nobody announces this as a philosophy. It is simply the order of things.

I know both worlds well.

I spent years running before and after office hours. Squeezing my body into the schedule. Negotiating time with myself. Being outside, but only technically, the way the farmers in their cabins are technically in the fields.

I don't say this with bitterness. It was simply what it was.

But I feel very differently now.

Central Europe has a particular relationship with darkness. Austrian winters are genuinely dark. Not (only) metaphorically, but physically. Sometimes days or even weeks pass without real sunshine. The sky turns a flat grey and stays there, and the body begins to carry a weight that is very difficult to name until it lifts.

And then spring comes. And people try to recover something that was quietly depleted over months of grey mornings and four o'clock darkness.

This is where Joseph Pilates enters my thinking.

Joe was German. He grew up in a culture where physical education was taken seriously. The Turnverein (the gymnastics clubs that shaped public life across nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany) embedded movement, nature, and health in how people understood their bodies.

His father was a gymnast. Physical practice was not an add-on to daily life. It was part of the architecture of it.

When he wrote "by all means never fail to get all the sunshine and fresh air you can" I don't think he was writing a wellness tip.

I think he was writing from a body that understood deprivation.

And I understand that sentence, in my bones, in a way I could not have understood it twenty years ago.

Standing in that landscape on Thursday, beautiful, vast, empty of other people, I felt a sharpness I didn't know what to do with because I know where everyone is.

They are in offices. In cars. In rooms that have forgotten what outside smells like. Working to make a living, to afford holidays, to earn the right to eventually rest in the very landscapes they are too busy to stand in now.

Some of them will pay considerable money to fly somewhere beautiful and spend most of their days around their hotel, while the actual beauty goes largely unwitnessed.

I am not judging this. I was inside it for years.

But I also cannot pretend not to notice the irony: we work so hard to make a living that we forget to actually make the living happen.

I don't have a solution to offer.

The system is what it is, and most people are not in a position to simply opt out of it.

I made specific and significant sacrifices over a number of years to reach the life I have now, and I am aware that those sacrifices are not available to everyone.

But I do have a question:

How much sunshine do you actually allow into your life?

Not just the idea of it, but the real thing. The warmth on your skin, the fresh air in your lungs, the shift it creates throughout your nervous system. What are you trading it for? And do you know the terms of that trade?

Here is what I know after that Thursday run, after all those hours in the light, after all the years of running before and after office hours, and finally able to run at noon:

Sunshine and fresh air aren't a reward for finishing your work.

They've been there all along.

Joe knew this.

A man who grew up in Germany, who understood dark winters and the hunger for sunshine that follows them, who spent his whole life insisting that the body needs air and light and open space.

He wrote it plainly, in one sentence, as if it were almost too obvious to need saying.

By all means. As if there is no argument. As if the only possible obstacle is us: our schedules, our choices, our habit of saying not yet, not today, maybe tomorrow.

The sun will be there tomorrow. It always is.

The question is whether you will.