The Truly Healthy Person

In this day and age, people still talk about “health” as though it can only be obtained by the sacrifice of some other aspect(s) of their being -- instead of it being the whole point of their existence -- to be as fully developed (healthy) as they can ever be. In a previous time, it was even widely believed that one sold (sacrificed) one’s health -- to earn a living, as in the case of the coal miners, or others who believed the stress they underwent, was what it took to earn a living -- and there was no other choice.

Men under those conditions, were expected to have a heart attack at 45 -- forcing many to adopt new life patterns they couldn’t unless forced in this way. To choose an “easier” path was regarded as unmanly, if not cowardly. The difficult path was regarded invariably, as the virtuous one.

That was the conditioning of the past -- that making anything “hard, tedious, laborious,” was the virtuous path -- while that which was “easy,” was regarded as the devil’s doing. Nobody thought to question that -- that virtue lay only in embracing hardship and difficulty above all else, and particularly productivity and effectiveness.

The first hint that that was not the road to utopia, was when the mass marketers realized that making their products easy to use, was more important than making them difficult to use -- if they wanted to sell to everybody, rather than only an exclusive few. Products used to be valued for their status as much as their usefulness. To some extent, that is still true. People like the feeling of having something not everyone has -- or to be able to do something only a few can do.

The downside is that when everybody can do what everybody else does, they are not aware that some do it a whole lot better than others -- which is true in everything -- not because one necessarily wants it to be that way, but because it happens to be that way.

So whether one wants there to be sameness -- or diversity, doesn’t matter as much as they turn out to be -- which is finding out. Very few can approach anything that way -- that finding out the truth of the matter, is more important than what one would like it to be -- beforehand.

One wants to be rich or successful -- without first bothering to find out what it is one is doing, and not knowing that, one can hardly be successful or rich, yet one hears it all the time, that people want to be successful without caring what it is they do to accomplish that “success.” Obviously, these are words without meaning -- but the sounds are so mesmerizing and pleasant. Many undoubtedly feel that all that is necessary is just to say the words -- and that is enough to make them true.

The truly healthy person is this one to whom perception and the reality are the same -- that the person they are, is not merely wishful thinking. -- but the fact of their existence. Why isn’t one the person one wants to be -- and who really, is preventing that?