Take the first five minutes of the day to help you stay supple and strong. In fact, you don’t even have to get out of bed. My 80 year-old mother bent down to reach into the depths of a cupboard to retrieve a wayward item that had fallen off the shelf. Her spine stiffened and her hand shot to her low back. “Ouch, my back!” she exclaimed. Wincing with pain, she returned to an upright position. “I guess I’m getting old,” she said. As someone who studies posture and skeletal alignment, I desperately wanted to say something helpful in that moment that would change her perspective on aging and restore her hope for the future. I wished she’d had a user’s manual we could reference to figure out where she’d gone wrong and protect her from injuring herself in the future. I searched for words to lift her spirits, but I came up