Sometimes, you just have to get up and move

On heaviness, healing, and feeling alive.

The year didn’t begin gently.

It began with front-page news that felt relentless, one deeply unsettling headline after another. Politics and business are increasingly intertwined. Large companies are growing larger, while we, middle-class America, quietly adjust. Stretching budgets. Reworking plans. Carrying a little more than before.

I feel that heaviness deeply, and I know I’m not alone. This kind of pressure doesn’t announce itself loudly. It accumulates. It settles in small, invisible ways: into our shoulders, our breath, the way we move through our days. It doesn’t just live in the mind. It takes up residence in the body.

I kept asking myself: How do we not let this heaviness consume us?

Not in a grand or philosophical way, but in the most ordinary, Monday-morning sense of the question. What do we actually do with it? How do I feel my power when so much around me seems designed to make me feel small?

What kept coming back to me was strength. Not the performative kind. Not the buzzword version. But a quieter strength—one built through daily choices. Through showing up. Through the kindness we practice in ordinary moments, toward others, and just as importantly, toward ourselves.

It was a Monday at the start of January.

The holidays had faded, and everyone was easing back into the rhythm of work. I had forty minutes before a call and had already spent most of my morning staring at my screen.

I thought: What can I do in these forty minutes that would feel meaningful—not just for my mind, but for my body too?

With my work, there are days when I spend close to ten hours at the computer, only to lie down at night and do it again the next day. Over time, that creates a quiet disconnection, a feeling of living slightly outside yourself. So, I got up.

It was pouring outside. I put on a thermal, grabbed my phone, and went for a walk. Even though I’m fortunate enough to have exercise equipment at home, I realized I didn’t need efficiency. I needed sensation. I needed to feel and see things; to remember that I am alive, and that I belong somewhere.

The green of the oak trees. Bulbs beginning to push through the soil. The smell of rain hanging in the air.

We’re lucky enough to live near a stream. The water was moving fast, full from the storm, sounding almost like a small waterfall. Standing there, I could feel its motion, its insistence. Everything around me was moving, and I remembered that I could, too.

We’re so used to the self-help version of things that sometimes we’re numb to it. Sometimes I don’t actually feel like doing the thing that’s supposed to help. Sometimes I feel apathetic toward my own care. I didn’t want to go on that walk.

But I told myself: You need to feel your physical space on this planet. Your legs are still moving.

And when you get into your fifties, your body begins to change in ways you don’t always understand. Knees hurt when you stand up. Aches appear without warning, then disappear just as quietly. Your body speaks more often, and more honestly.

That walk became my way of reminding myself that I don’t need to feel small, neither politically nor physically. I needed to feel my power again. And it came from something simple.

At the start, I chose to run.

I told myself: I need to know that this body can still run.

I didn’t run the whole way (it was only a 0.75-mile distance!), but I ran as much as I could. That rhythm, my body working with itself, breath and muscle and will, felt deeply grounding. Alive.

So much of this, for me, is about wanting to feel alive. We live in an electronic world now, where so much of our worth, our economy, our attention exists online. But we are not digital beings. We are physical ones.

When I came home, I took a quick shower and returned to a few small self-care rituals—things I’ve learned to come back to over time.

Dry brushing. Short strokes toward the heart, like polishing a boot. Energizing, never painful.

Abhyanga massage. A brief lymphatic ritual—forty-five seconds. Nothing elaborate.

By the time I was ready for my call, something had shifted. I felt present again. Connected. Back in my body.

It reminded me that healing doesn’t always arrive in dramatic moments. Sometimes it begins quietly—with choosing to move, to feel, to return to yourself. Again and again.

My word for 2026 is Healing.

With Love,

Rashmin K. Joshi