We tend to use the words health and fitness as though they mean much the same thing.
They don’t.
You can become extraordinarily fit for a particular task while becoming less healthy in the process. An endurance athlete can become superbly adapted to extreme physical stress while compromising other aspects of the body. A businessperson can become extraordinarily fit for 80-hour weeks while slowly destroying sleep, relationships and metabolic health.
Fitness is adaptation to a demand.
Health is something larger.
I have come to think of “health” as:
The dynamic capacity of the organism to remain informationally and functionally integrated as a whole, to adapt to life’s challenges and, when disrupted, to restore the greatest achievable degree of coherence.
Put more simply:
Fitness asks: Can I do this?
Health asks: What is doing this doing to the whole of me?
But there is a third question—and perhaps it is the most important:
Why am I doing it at all?
Health Is Not the Purpose of Life
There is an old Greek joke.
A woman asks her doctor whether she is likely to live a long life.
“Do you smoke?”
“No.”
“Drink?”
“Never.”
“Sex?”
“Absolutely not.”
The doctor looks puzzled.
“Then why do you want to live so long?”
This is not WWC’s new health protocol.
But there is something wonderfully Greek about the representative of medicine being the one who asks the question medicine itself cannot answer.
Medicine can preserve life.
Health can increase our capacity for life.
Fitness can prepare us for life’s demands.
None of them can tell us what life is for.
My Ryoho Yoga master, Andzej Gospodarczyk, would often say:
“We don’t do yoga every day to become good at yoga. We do yoga to become good at life.”
Exactly.
We don’t become healthy to become good at being healthy.
We become healthy to become good at life.
What Are You Training For?
There is a beautiful clue hidden in the Greek word askesis — ἄσκησις.
It means practice, exercise or training. It eventually gave English the words ascetic and asceticism.
The ascetic, in the original sense, was someone in training.
That changed my understanding of something Andzej’s own master, Masahiro Oki, used to say:
“Every day is training.”
Training for what?
Not merely stronger muscles, greater flexibility or better biomarkers.
Life itself becomes the training ground.
A difficult conversation can be training. A financial loss can train equanimity. Hunger can train restraint. Injury can train patience. Success can train humility and satiety. Uncertainty can train surrender.
This doesn’t mean pretending suffering is good or believing misfortune was sent to teach us a lesson.
It simply means that if an experience is already ours, we can use it.
Every day is training.
But we don’t train to become good at training.
We train to become good at life.
A Mighty Purpose
George Bernard Shaw wrote of the joy of being used for a purpose recognised by oneself as a “mighty one.” Elsewhere, he spoke of wanting to be “thoroughly used up” when he died and compared life to a splendid torch temporarily entrusted to us.
I love that image.
It presents a very different ideal from arriving at death as a perfectly preserved biological specimen.
Would you rather be a pristine corpse—or thoroughly used up in pursuit of something you considered worthwhile?
Of course, those aren’t the only choices. Health may allow us to burn the torch both brighter and longer.
But Shaw reminds us that longevity isn’t the ultimate objective.
Life is.
Viktor Frankl arrived from a very different direction at something similar. He rejected the idea that psychological health necessarily requires a tensionless state. His concept of noö-dynamics described a healthy tension between where we are and some worthwhile meaning or task still waiting to be fulfilled.
We need some tension.
We need a reason to get out of bed.
We need something calling us forward.
We need something to live on—and something to live for.
But Bigger Doesn’t Mean More
There is a danger here.
“Mighty purpose” can easily become another justification for obsession.
More money. More achievement. More recognition. More training. More followers. More years.
There is nothing particularly healthy about being insatiable.
A healthy organism doesn’t merely possess powerful accelerator systems. It also knows when to apply the brakes.
Growth requires inhibition. Effort requires recovery. Appetite requires satiety.
So does ambition.
Satiety is the ability to experience enough.
It means being able to enjoy food without having to consume endlessly; success without endlessly requiring another accolade; wealth without needing the next dollar to prove one’s worth; ambition without becoming its servant.
Self-mastery isn’t the elimination of appetite, fear or ambition.
It is the freedom to hear their demands without automatically obeying them.
Sometimes becoming fitter means learning to endure more.
Sometimes becoming healthier means recognising that we should carry less.
The Bridge
I sometimes ask people to imagine themselves as a bridge.
Every day traffic crosses it: work, family responsibilities, financial worries, exercise, food, alcohol, illness, relationships, ambition, fear.
We can strengthen the bridge. That’s part of fitness.
We can reduce unnecessary traffic. That’s part of intelligent living.
But the objective isn’t to eliminate all traffic.
A bridge with no traffic has ceased to fulfil its purpose.
So too with us.
The goal isn’t to engineer a life containing no challenge, no stress and no risk.
It is to develop sufficient health and fitness to carry the traffic that makes our particular life worth living.
Becoming Well Can Be Frightening
This is something I have observed repeatedly in wellness practice.
People understandably arrive wanting their pain, fatigue or illness to disappear. But sometimes an ailment has existed for so long that it has become entwined with identity.
Recovery then poses an uncomfortable question:
If this is no longer stopping me, what am I going to do with my life?
Removing alcohol is difficult if one’s social life revolves around drinking. Reducing work is difficult if professional achievement supplies identity. Changing food is difficult if food supplies comfort, culture and connection.
Health therefore cannot always be pursued in isolation.
Sometimes a person needs something stronger pulling them forward than illness is pulling them backwards.
It doesn’t have to be grand.
Raising children can be a mighty purpose. Caring for another person can be one. Teaching. Building. Creating. Serving a community. Growing a garden.
The important words in Shaw’s formulation are “recognised by yourself.”
Nobody else gets to choose it.
The Small Self
And perhaps there is one further dimension.
Much of what drives us is the machinery of survival: hunger, fear, status, reproduction, possession, recognition, self-protection.
That machinery isn’t evil. We couldn’t survive without it.
But we don’t necessarily have to regard it as the entirety of who we are.
This is where ancient traditions of Christianity, Buddhism, yoga and others become interesting even if you don’t accept their metaphysics.
Their doctrines differ profoundly. But many of their practices—fasting, meditation, prayer, service, restraint, forgiveness, contemplation—can be understood as forms of askesis.
Askesis = Training
I am hungry, but I don’t necessarily have to eat.
I am angry, but I don’t necessarily have to retaliate.
I am afraid, but fear doesn’t have to make the decision.
I desire something, but desire doesn’t command me.
Perhaps spirituality begins when the small self ceases to be experienced as the entirety of one’s existence.
And perhaps health, at its best, gives us enough freedom from the body’s constant demands to explore that possibility.
So What Are You Becoming Fit For?
That may be a better wellness question than:
How long will I live?
Or:
What is my VO₂ max?
Instead:
What am I trying to become capable of?
What am I training for?
What is worth spending some of my finite life upon?
Health gives us capacity.
Fitness prepares that capacity.
Purpose deploys it.
Values determine where we point it.
And life is what it’s all for.
Every day is training.
Train to become good at life.
LIVE BIGGER.
James Polyzoidis
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