Mind. Body. Soul.

Between twenty and thirty, I was indestructible. Or at least I lived as though I were. Somewhere after forty and before sixty, life quietly corrected that assumption. For a few years, I let myself go more than I should have, and when the answer from the medical world began sounding increasingly like a diet of pills, I made a decision: medicine when necessary, certainly—but first I wanted to discover what I could still change through the way I lived. Now, nearing seventy, after making many of the changes I wanted to make this summer, something else has occurred to me. Maybe I’ve been measuring the wrong things. Instead of allowing nutrients, macros, pounds, medications, and numbers to become the whole story, I’ve begun thinking about something I’ve practiced in Aikido for decades: Mind. Body. Soul. A human being as a bridge between heaven and earth—not three separate pieces to manage, but one life to care for.

For my mind, I read every day, but I also write. More than thirty books later, I’ve realized writing has become one of the ways I understand my own life. I listen to ideas that challenge me, especially those that arrive from places I wasn’t expecting. Just this week, several very different people seemed to circle the same thought: perhaps the distance between a problem and an opportunity is sometimes nothing more than the place from which we choose to look at it. That one stayed with me. I carried it into meditation. I turned it over while writing. I let it bother me a little—which is often where the worthwhile thoughts begin. Scripture tells us to dwell on what is true, noble, right, pure, lovely and admirable. Maybe tending the mind isn’t simply protecting what enters it. Maybe it is continuing to give it something worthy to wrestle with.

For my body, I’ve started treating this aging collection of water, minerals, muscle, bone, and mystery almost like a science project—not because I’m trying to become twenty-five again, but because I’d like to take good care of whatever years remain. I eat more protein and fewer unnecessary carbohydrates. I try to stay out of the processed-food dumpster. I use vitamins and supplements thoughtfully, and I keep moving—strength, mobility, balance, Aikido, breath. I’m less interested now in what the scale says than in whether this body can continue carrying me into the life I still want to live. “Your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit…” has begun to sound less like an instruction about appearance and more like one about stewardship.

And somewhere inside all of this is Melody Corbin. There really isn’t a clean line where my mind, body, and spirit end and our life together begins. We are one, and she has often been my North Star when my own compass became unreliable. Loving another person changes what taking care of yourself means. I don’t want more years simply to accumulate them. I want years in which we are still able to laugh, travel, argue over something ridiculous, sit quietly together, and recognize the extraordinary gift hidden inside another ordinary morning.

For my soul, I’ve stopped trying to make my faith acceptable to everybody. My faith is not in how perfectly I perform Christianity, how much faith I can manufacture, or whether I can construct an argument convincing enough to satisfy every believer, skeptic, or atheist. The object of my faith is Christ. When He said come, I came. It is Him—not me. And perhaps that has made me less interested in proselytizing and more interested in simply living peacefully enough that someone might someday wonder where the peace came from. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” If my faith produces something worth sharing, I hope it looks more like those things than an argument I managed to win.

So nearing seventy, maybe health means something different to me than it once did. Feed the mind. Steward the body. Tend the soul. Love the person walking beside you. Keep writing. Keep learning. Keep moving. Keep believing. Not because any of it makes us indestructible. Age has cured me of that illusion. But because there are still mornings ahead, still pages unwritten, still people to love, and still a life worth showing up for.

There comes a moment when you realize…
The past is an incredible teacher.

It’s just a terrible place to live.

We weren’t meant to carry every regret forever.

We weren’t meant to replay every mistake until it became our identity.

We weren’t meant to let yesterday keep stealing today’s joy.

The past has already done its work.

It taught us.

It humbled us.

It shaped us.

Now it asks only one thing in return:

Move forward.

Your future is waiting for the person you’ve become because of what you’ve been through—not despite it.