Health is an extraordinary thing. In reality, we wouldn’t know when we are healthy were it not for the fact that we know what illness is.
I could say it like this: health is the absence of illness and discomforts. That is, health is there when everything is okay.
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Yet, because there are no discomforts or illnesses, we feel happy, which means we experience physical, mental, and social well-being. Hence, being healthy has a positive effect.
But, I want to go a bit further than just that. I would say that health is also the ability to successfully fight illness.
What I mean is that when we become infected by, for instance, a bacteria or virus, we’ll probably feel ill, have fever, but in the end our body might be able to fight it off. We win. Our body wins. That’s also health.
Feeling pain and tension is health also. It means that we are sensitive. Sensitivity is health, because being able to sense, to have a body that acts as a sensor, is important. When we sense, we can learn, and we can act. Our body can learn and act.
If we would have become numb, hard, dull, and insensitive, our body wouldn’t be able to learn and would perhaps act/react too late. It’s like the childlike state. Children are highly sensitive: they become ill quickly, but heal quickly likewise.
Unfortunately, too many people have become increasingly insensitive. This may be due to overmedication, loss of the body-mind connection, deliberate emotional and mental suppression of symptoms, or because of a body that gradually hardened and became a muscle-tensed rock.
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That can go well for a long time: we can suppress, ignore, and compensate artificially, but at some point, when the body’s voice has been ignored and suppressed for too long, it will react. It will come out of its box, surface violently, asking to be heard. And sometimes we’ll still have the chance to fix things, but sometimes it will be too late.
Then again, health is also the ability to accept the facts when the body might not be healthy; we might be able to work on it and restore our health, but sometimes it may turn out that we have a certain disorder or dysfunction (genetic or not) we’ll need to live with in the best way we can.
Yet, we might be able to compensate in meaningful ways, in healthy ways, in ways that strengthen the healthy parts of our body, thereby enabling us to cope better with those body parts that need our help.
