Field Notes: The Shape of Endurance
In my current fitness theory course, we’re studying the FITT principle, which explains that fewer repetitions build strength while more repetitions can help us build endurance. In life, too, there are times when we need raw strength to pull ourselves out of a hard place, but increasingly I’m realizing that it’s endurance that carries us forward. Just as functional fitness is becoming more popular in 2025, I’m learning to cultivate a more functional way of living. I want to expand my endurance muscle, the one that helps me stay steady through uncertainty, inconvenience, and interdependence. I’m balancing a masters degree, ill and aging parents, dogs, a partners care while our caregivers themselves are away tending to their own bodies, and full-time work. But I don’t feel an impending sense of doom, and I know it’s because I have a support system and my own systems. And, despite hard times, I have it pretty easy when you think big picture and I carry a lot of gratitude in my heart for that each day.
The Weight of Care
Caregiving research can be sobering. Informal caregivers, the ones quietly supporting loved ones without pay or formal acknowledgment, often have life expectancies lower than those they care for. The weight of responsibility, emotional upheaval, and chronic stress take a measurable toll. In Canada, for example, one in four people aged 15 + reported giving care to family/friends with long-term conditions — 7.8 million caregivers in 2018 (Statistics Canada, 2022). Moreover, the review by Streck et al. found that patients and caregivers in cancer-care dyads show health interdependence: caregivers’ psychological (and to a lesser degree physical) morbidity is strongly linked with that of the patient (2020). And yet, there are also studies pointing to something far more hopeful, including a 20-year prospective cohort study exploring self-acceptance and interdependence as contributors to longer life and better well-being (Ng, Allore, & Levy, 2020).
The Convenience Trap
If we value convenience above all else, especially convenience designed to reduce any personal friction, are we quietly harming ourselves? We are lonelier than ever. Many of us rely heavily on ultra-processed foods. Women in particular are targeted by marketing that insists we need an endless stream of new products to compensate for the natural shifts in our skin as we enter our thirties and beyond. I’m fortunate to have grown up at a time when sunscreen and a reliable moisturizer are considered enough. Less is more. Routine is more. Commitment to what matters is more. Right?
Having dependents of any kind can feel inconvenient. A cat, a dog, a child, a parent, a partner. Disability and illness are normal parts of the human experience, not failures of it. When a single inconvenience is enough to derail our day, that is when things may be unnatural. The presence of dependents reshapes our routines, but it also strengthens our capacity to endure. Interdependence isn’t a burden—it’s an exercise in expanding the heart. One survey indicated that caregivers who provide 20 or more hours of care per week are significantly more likely to report stress, less time for self-care and social life, while still finding their experience rewarding (Statistics Canada, 2022). Being needed, and needing others, expands endurance.
Don’t Skip the Walk or Talk
Times are hard. Life is heavy. Yet we can manage our way through those times and even strengthen ourselves by how we respond. Taking a walk in nature, sitting with a coffee and conversation rather than hustling more work. Those are NOT indulgences; they’re endurance-builders. Studies show that being outdoors, connecting with nature, reduces stress and improves life satisfaction and we’ve known this for centuries (MacMullin, 2014). When we choose the walk, the conversation, or the pause, we choose to build our endurance.
Parents having illness is part of the circle of life too. It is more common than not for us to all go through this at some point in our lives and there is far more support out there than we think. And, it’s not an excuse to not show up for ourselves. If we treat it as an excuse, we risk sinking deeper into individualism rather than reaching toward interdependence. One article underscores that caregiving for elderly parents has significant impact (financial, mental, emotional) but also frames it as a privilege. But here’s a key insight: caring for others and caring for yourself are not opposites. They are two sides of the same coin.
The Marketization of Care
One of society’s deepest failures is that we have created an entire market to care for people, instead of supporting the people who already care. The one’s who know exactly how you like your toast and eggs done. Your favourite colour, too. Rather than strengthening the social fabric that naturally holds aging parents, disabled partners, sick children, or vulnerable neighbours, we’ve commercialized the very human act of tending to one another. In Canada, this shows up clearly in the way long-term care has shifted toward private, profit-driven models. We have made it easier to outsource care than to financially support the millions of Canadians who already provide it. The reality is that unpaid caregivers save our health-care system billions of dollars every year, yet many of them struggle to pay their own bills, take time off work, or access mental-health support. Instead of investing in the people who do the most essential relational work, we pour resources into systems that remove care from community and place it behind the walls of privatized facilities. This isn’t to say care homes don’t have a place — they absolutely do, especially for complex needs — but the imbalance is striking. We’ve normalized the idea that exhaustion is personal failure, rather than the predictable outcome of a society that treats caregiving as an individual responsibility instead of a collective one. When a culture becomes so focused on productivity that caring for a parent becomes an unaffordable act, something fundamental has gone wrong.
Supporting caregivers with livable benefits, workplace protections, flexible schedules, respite programs, and publicly funded long-term care would do more to strengthen the endurance of our communities than any convenience economy ever could. Instead of building a market around caring, as we’ve done for wellness or exercise or things that really can be done quite cheaply, a society that recognizes interdependence as both natural and necessary. When we treat care as a shared responsibility, we don’t just improve outcomes, we restore something essential about what it means to be human.
Interdependence as Part of the Journey
Interdependence means we lean on each other. Not just from a place of weakness, but from a place of mutual strength. In caring for a parent, a partner, a friend, we exercise this muscle. We practice being needed and practicing needing others. That gives us endurance. When the father who once drove you to school now struggles getting out of bed and you help him, that moment isn’t just about doing a task; it’s about human continuity, passing of roles, the ebb and flow of strength. It’s also about giving that strength, sharing it, and growing through it. It’s ok to admit that it’s heavy and hard, but it’s normal. The discomfort, the entry into a new stage or chapter in life, is not easy.
A Calgary taxi driver from Somalia told us something a few months ago. His children (our age) laugh when he flies across the country to help a cousin who is sick, as if that kind of commitment is strange. He just smiled and said, “Is that not the whole point of life? To show up when someone needs you?” And while his service was something we paid for, this is also a man who showed up for us countless times on our trip away, without haste, to support our needs and our conveniences. The same thoughtfulness given to strangers.
Life will continue to hand you heavier weights. Some you choose, some you never asked for. Routines will shift. Expectations will be challenged. But the question is never whether you can avoid difficulty. It is how you move through it, how you keep lifting even when the set feels long, how you return to yourself and the people you love. When you care for others and allow others to care for you, you are building the kind of endurance that makes a life feel full. I do not need to live to ninety or a hundred. What I want is to live a life where the people around me are better because I was here, where I showed up for myself and for those with less, where strength and compassion grew side by side. That is a meaningful life. That is enough.
