Playing lots of different sports growing up is a way to balance one's life if one is studying and laboring at other activities.
As the saying goes, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," as well as "All play and no work makes Jack a dull boy."
It means that spending all one's time studying and working, without any time for leisure or recreation, can lead to an unhealthy and unbalanced personality.
Living a life while growing up, you embark on many fronts.
We learn countless new things while growing up.
We educate our minds by studying at school, as our parents and guardians wisely instructed us to do.
Also, homework had a different meaning for my brothers and sisters and me. It was working industriously to care for our sizable home and the surroundings that housed our large family.
In addition, we played many sports with our schoolmates, our neighbors, and our town friends and acquaintances.
Socializing with all our family and friends from our hometown was a necessary pastime as we grew up.
Therefore, take time for hobbies, social activities, or other forms of recreation like music, dancing, and going out together with friends and family.
So my socializing with strong drink was to balance out the hard, laborious work we did at home and the strenuous exercises while playing sports, developing into adulthood.
It highlights the importance of maintaining a balance between work and recreational sports for overall well-being.
More importantly, an unbalanced person risks unhealthy growth.
If we think of one's body like a car, if it’s not balanced (like if the wheels are misaligned or the engine isn’t getting the right fuel), things start wearing out way faster than they should.
An unbalanced person, whether it’s from poor diet, chronic stress, lack of sleep, or even emotional turmoil, puts their body under constant strain.
Over time, this weakens the immune system, messes up hormones, and causes inflammation, which is like little fires burning inside you.
Where there is a lack of exercise, it can lead to muscles and joints weakening, leading to pain and faster aging.
We all know that an unhealthy diet can damage cells and organs, leading to illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease. Stress can wear down one's brain, heart, and immune system.
And an emotional imbalance can be the cause of depression or anxiety, which can actually speed up cell damage.
Continuous work without breaks can lead to burnout, stress, and ultimately, a decrease in productivity.
So when one's body is always fighting to stay stable, things start breaking down prematurely.
It is kind of like a car that’s never properly maintained.
That’s why balance—eating well, managing stress, moving your body, and keeping a positive mindset—is so important for our long-term health!
Pursuing diverse interests with a range of experiences can make a person well-rounded. So both work and play are valued.
When I was growing up, in school and college AND after my college days of learning, sports were a most integral part of life.
Cricket, football, table tennis, and lawn tennis were my go-to sports.
Although I never climbed the heights of a super sportsman, I ventured into other academic fields such as electronic music technology and the world of computers.
It is such a rewarding field that it fascinates me so much that to this day, I am still learning, growing, and developing with this evolving technology.
I played a lot of small-goal football. In my childhood, my neighbors frequented the home I lived in.
Our home had a field where we played small-goal football to our hearts' delight.
Our home was over an acre in size, and we learned what hard work truly means by maintaining the lawns, fields, and different fruit orchards. Cleaning inside our home was a constant chore.
And windball cricket was also a popular sport in my hometown. This sport we enjoyed playing among all the teams and the youths who grew up together.
Table tennis was played at my secondary school and at any venue that had a table tennis board waiting for us to play on. Venues such as those in our neighborhood and our church hall.
However, 'lawn tennis' was my most favored sporting activity. In my hometown, there were a couple of facilities for public and private courts.
Most of my young adult friends played together for long hours. And afterwards we limed together.
"Lime" in my home country means "hanging out," like the Americans say.
What can be said is that my growing-up years were made up of schooling, sports, hard work, and socializing. All these undertakings involved a tremendous amount of physical activity.
We worked extremely hard because we had many responsibilities growing up. A sizable home can do that.
Before my teenage years were over, I learned an important truth: "You do not own anything; it owns you." You had to work hard with tremendous sweat energy to care for your possessions.
There is a poem by John Keats that goes, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." We change that to say, "A thing of beauty is a JOB forever."
We lived in a loving home with lots of other brothers and sisters.
So the rooms and the large home we lived in had many responsibilities. The amount of chores we had to attend to in all the years we were growing up made adults of my brothers and sisters and me.
So living life and maturing was a fascinating, joyful, captivating, and engaging experience for me, to say the least.
So yes, take care of yourself along the way to reaching adulthood; your life will be full of beautiful memories.
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