I define health to be freedom.
Health is:
- freedom of enjoyment
- freedom from ailments
- freedom from worry
Basically, health is being able to experience life optimally. We strive to maintain health so that we can see our grandchildren grow up, complete a lifelong project, travel the world, and basically anything that we are inspired to do.
It entails the desire to live, the purpose in life, and the ability to pursue them.
Hence, health is a condition which cannot be pursued from one dimension.
Someone who has the body of a bodybuilder may experience his downfall in his temper. Whereas someone with great devotion to his family can fall prey to unhealthy eating habits.
Ultimately however, we find that everything comes full circle. The bodybuilder’s temper may land him in jail after a bar fight. The family man may contract diabetes and only cause his family worry.
These are undoubtedly extreme examples. In the first case, it may have been an impulsive action, made without thinking, to swing that fist into the jaw of another guy. Whereas in the second case, the spiral to the eventual debilitating illness was gradual and lost in the mass of work-related worries.
Health somehow manages to be robbed from us so quickly that we can’t do anything about it (say a car accident), or so slowly that we don’t notice it.
In either case, despite the inevitable uncertainty, we always would want to be able to give ourselves the certainty that we have tried the best that we can to achieve a peak state of achievement.
And yet this does not have to be viewed as some grand noble goal to shoot for. It is in fact a daily, inconspicuous and private victory. The ability to wake up feeling fresh due to a good night’s sleep, the energy to come home and enjoy the company of one’s family, and many more of these little gifts which life all give rise to the optimal life experience.
As such, health is an ongoing challenge and endeavour that will never see a conclusion. And though we can isolate a certain aspect of it, we can never ignore the profound effect that mental health will have on physical health and vice versa.
The take home message from all of this rambling is that no one single definition will apply to the term ‘health’. The best I can come up with, is the capacity to live life in the way that is optimal to you, leaving it up to the individual to define the term. That is where personal responsibility will have to take control, a topic worthy of much further discussion.
So the question that you must ask yourself is, “What does health mean to me?” The answer to that will be the motivation and the in itself the creation of health.
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