The seven movements

The last body letter of the first month is about children, and it's for you.

Margaret Whitehead is a British philosopher of physical education who in 2001 gave a name to something teachers had seen for decades: children who could pass a fitness test and had no physical literacy, no confidence, competence or desire to move for the rest of their lives, because they'd been drilled instead of taught. Her idea became policy in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. The World Health Organization's number for children is sixty minutes of varied, mostly playful movement every day. About a quarter of American kids reach it.

Physical literacy is the ability, the confidence and the wish to be physically active for life. Whitehead's point is that it's learned the way reading is, in a window, through variety and play. A child who learns to run, jump, throw, catch, climb, swim and balance by ten will keep moving as an adult in ways a child drilled on one sport will not. The sixty minutes isn't sixty minutes of sport. It's sixty minutes of anything, broken up, mostly unstructured, outdoors when possible.

This sits at the end of the month called You because the body you have at forty was literate or illiterate by twelve. So the mirror looks backward. Which of the seven did you learn, and which did you never get? Most adults are missing two or three, and those are exactly the ones they avoid in a gym without knowing why. That's not a character flaw. It's an inventory of what you were handed and what you built, which is the question this whole month has been asking.

And here's the hopeful part. Every one of the seven can still be learned. A swim lesson for an adult is the most avoided door in this chamber and the easiest to walk through. Watch a grown man learn to float and you'll understand the whole point of this year.