(Opinion article)

A week ago one old doctor astonished me with a funny affirmation, “Look at the ankles of the present-day youngsters! They are thin like chicken bones! Don`t you know why? They lack the Earth Energy. The miserable asphalt jungle kids!”

At first, I could not accept such odd assertion but after several Underground trips where I glanced just only on the male and female ankles in their late teens and young twenties, I could not but notice that the ankles, in their majority, were really chicken thin! They shrieked silently with SOS signals, “Send us Outside to Scenery!” “SOS!” “Surroundings call Our Souls!” “SOS!”

On the other side, while conducting, hmm, empirical research in several country buses, I found out that there the situation was completely different. All young huckle-bones looked hard, hale and healthy. I came to conclusion that, at least partly, the Old Doc was right, “The Mother Nature takes care of our health and the more often we go hiking, camping, and swimming, the more rosy-cheeked and wide-ankle we are.”

While thinking over my latest anatomy discovery,  I switched on my TV with a typical ‘talented’ boy-meets-girl story and noticed as the young lovers swallowed the handfuls of pills and tablets, not forgetting to share sincerely their thoughts about the better way of their lozenges ingesting, either with a chocolate butter or a strawberry ice-cream…Once again I heard the call of Mother Nature, “These love doves don`t have an old Grandfather who would grab their collars and threw them far away to some log cabin hidden in the dense forests of Alaska or a humpy-dumpy shack on the seashore of some ocean, that`s why they are doomed to be encircled by a flock of medicine ducks and to gobble spoonfuls of pills.”  Unfortunately, these youngsters don`t know that from all keep-fit procedures nothing compares with a month of nature therapy…

Sun Father and Earth Mother are reliable partners and if we see them regularly not on a computer screen but in a live version, we don`t run around the hospitals like half crazy hares, we don`t ask each other about the color of bags under our eyes, we don`t seek info about chicken ankles, we just enjoy our lives and keep the nose with a rubber hose! I can`t but agree with Hans C. Anderson, “Just living is not enough…one must have the sunshine, freedom, and a little flower!”  So, if you want to get rid of chicken ankles, remember about the Agro fitness, Mountain climbing and Forest hiking in general, and the ‘Flower Power’ in particular. The summer is coming!