The Great Secret of Health

How healthy you are, implies how well you are doing.  That should be self-evident truth -- and not how much you are "making," or spending on health care -- or anything else for that matter.  Health (prosperity) is not how much time, energy and money one spends trying to obtain health, fitness and well-being -- but is the simple and apparent actuality of it -- lost in all the marketing, promotions and ignorance of it.

First of all, it is not the exclusive turf of any one group of professionals and experts who dispense these things -- because only they can and have been duly authorized (certified) to do so.  As always, people have to provide it to themselves, for themselves -- and that is the Great Secret of Health -- nobody can provide it for another.  That is what each can only give to themselves, provide for themselves.

Of course they can learn from others -- but each individual has to learn what works for themselves, as well as others, but also what may work for others, but not for themselves.  Individual variation improves the fitness and survival of the species because it allows enough range of tolerance and adaptability so that 100% of the species are not wiped out by any one monumental challenge -- but a few survive and go on to perpetuate and revive the species.  Thus the greater the diversity in this regard, the better the chances of survival -- not just for the one, but for the entire species.

And while many organizations and trade associations will arise from time to time to proclaim their supreme knowledge of what is best for all humanity for all time, that knowledge is by nature's design also imperfect -- and a work in progress.  There is no ultimate, final answer on anything -- but an ever-evolving better one.

Doctors, or even personal coaches, cannot make one the best -- because they'll neverr know, nor have the time and interest to become the world's leading expert on every individual.  They serve best by becoming their own best selves -- in learning of themselves, as well as others -- and so their function is to make one as much like the others (normal) as possible, which is not necessarily one's best -- unless they are that theoretical normal "average."  But obviously, the average is not the best, or it would not be best, but only average -- whatever that is.  And there is nothing wrong with knowing that -- and how to get there if one isn't at that level.

But some will never get there, because they just don't have it in them -- while a few will never be average because they were born with abilities that far surpass the normal -- to begin with.  But each is working with what they were born with -- and then can refine to a remarkable degree.  Not everyone is born at average height or weight -- quite obviously.  Some people may grow to 7' tall, and a few only to 2'.

Those particularly on the far ends of the extremes, will never know what a "normal" life is -- but they'll know what is normal for them, and how they can become better (and worse) at what they do and the persons they are.  So telling and advising wha the "average" are, has actually very little relevance to how any individual can achieve the greatest health and functioning on the arbitrary measures of what it would take to become normal.

That is especially true in discussing "normal" aging, which is our expectations that people should be deteriorating in the proper manner we've only seen before -- rather than that we haven't seen before -- as the new health paradigm.  We already see that in a few -- of people who actually begin to blossom at "retirement" -- which would be a brilliant time to do so.  If only one could.

Certainly, one won't or can't, if they dismiss that possibility beginning at the first hint and suggestion that their recovery abilities are no longer inexhaustible -- as most normally do at 30, 40 and 50, so that by the time they are 60 and upon "retirement," don't think there is any hope for persisting long at that rate of decline.  But if that decline becomes improvement at any point, then the prognosis is quite a different story and a different outlook.