When I was growing up, my family had a cleaning woman named Margaret.  Life dealt her some rough cards over the years:  she had chronic respiratory problems; a son died way too young.  Nearly every week of Margaret's decades-long employment, when my mother would ask her how she was, Margaret would say, "I'm hanging in there, Mistress Heffernan."

I found myself thinking of Margaret today as the God-awful news about the economy kept rolling in, hour after hour.

All we're hearing these days is doom, gloom, more doom, and then some more gloom.  No matter who gets elected in November, half the country's going to be mad about it.  Meanwhile, we've got ourselves a forest of brush fires to put out.  In the words of Bruce Springsteen, it's going to be a Long Walk Home.

I have no brilliant words of solace for these unfortunate circumstances, but I will say this.

Most stories of personal tragedy begin with a line like this:  "Pete was going along fine, but then [his wife left him, he lost his job, the bank took his house, his son went to jail]."  In other words, there's an event that appears to change everything in Pete's life, and sets him on a fast track to being drunk, 50 pounds overweight, penniless and alone.

To my mind this initial speedbump isn't the most important part of Pete's story:  he suffered a setback--which happens to all of us:  me, you, the neighbor who came over to my house yesterday to tell me he'd lost his job.  

But it's not the setback that really screws up Pete's life.  It's the choices that Pete makes next.  Pete starts drinking.  He stops playing racquetball.  He stops connecting with his loved ones.  He stops thinking he deserves to take care of himself.

So I'm going to don my Dr. Phil bald-cap and say that if things start to go south for you, if you hit a hiccup--and I bet that will be happening to a LOT of us in coming weeks--don't stop exercising.  It's going to be tempting to throw in the towel, to just blow off your gym routine because hey, everything else is going to pot, why not grow a pot belly too?

I implore you, don't.

Don't, don't, don't.  Stay the course.  Exercise as hard as ever.  Recommit to it.  Compete at something.  Try something new.  Dig in and go at it like a madman. 

Sounds like the words of an evangelizing fitness-monkey, winding up the same old organ-grinder as the Titanic goes into the frosty, briny deep.

But consider:  for most of you, exercising is something you do well.  It releases beneficial hormones that balance our crazy, wildly swinging emotional states and make us feel calmer and more in control.  We feel healthy.  We feel more able to weather storminess.  We're reminded that there's more to life than fixating on the capricious vacillations of the Dow Jones or the latest political polls.  Working out reminds us that we're physically resilient, and from there, it's just a short imaginative leap to recognizing that we can bounce back from other kinds of hardship too.

I like to make mock and sport of exercise and fitness even as I promote it, simply because a lot of the time it seems like a pretty absurd way to spend one's time, much less make a living, but I firmly believe that exercise and fitness have kept me from going straight into the abyss on more than one occasion.

I spent much of the last year pursuing a job that would have changed life significantly for me and my family.  I sailed through one job-application hoop after another.  My interviews went brilliantly.  The big boss was impressed.  I was given a conditional job offer.  I was days away from starting my training with them.

And then they pulled the plug on me for reasons so insubstantial and asinine that to this day I can hardly believe that it actually happened.

For a few weeks there, aside from the support of my family, the only thing that got me out of bed in the morning, that kept my keel remotely even, was my exercise program.

Sure, I'm a fitness freak.  Of COURSE I love to exercise.  Of COURSE I find it therapeutic.  But I'd wager that even those of you for whom exercise is more of a chore will probably find some solace in the 'business-as-usual' feeling of keeping yourself healthy even when life is throwing you one curve ball after another.

So today I'm encouraging everyone, when the chips are down, and the alarm rings to wake you for your morning workout, don't turn it off.  Get up and get it done, even if you feel like the world is crashing around your ears, and even if it's the one good thing you do for yourself all day.  Carpe that diem, no matter how dire that particular diem may seem.

Hang in there.