THOUGHTS ON HEALTH – by jeremy
I read something very interesting yesterday. It said, Don’t focus on being attractive, or staying young – focus on being healthy. Being healthy is attractive and considered by many people to be a generally Good Thing. Another thing I read: if you’re healthy you can have a thousand problems. If you’re unhealthy, you only have one.
There is a fine line between working diligently on staying healthy vs. becoming hypochondriacal. I struggle with this myself. I’ve had an autoimmune disease since I was a teenager. My older sister has it too. Whenever I notice a peculiar spot or lump on my body I freak out, I get paranoid, I start asking the universe not to punish me again, don’t make me deal with the chronic pain again, I’ll say. I inject medicine into my kneecaps bi-monthly.
There’s a thought I had that’s been swirling around my head. There’s something oddly lonely about staying healthy. I think of that character from the TV show Parks and Rec, played by Rob Lowe, the character Chris. In the show he’s utterly dedicated to being the most healthy human being alive, determined to be the first person to live to 120 or something. But the crux of the humor of the character is that this obsession with his health ostracizes him from others. He struggles with true friendships and romantic relationships because his health is always his priority, and, more simply, it’s just fuckin’ weird. He’s a weird guy. No one cares that much about health.
I imagine myself as an old man, with a paperboy hat on and a wooden cane, and it’s the end of the world, nuclear war, climate apocalypse, and I’m all alone in a wasteland, like Waiting for Godot, and I’m like, the last guy on Earth, and the loneliness is crushing, but it’s OKAY, because I stayed healthy. I made it to the end. I am a survivor. Is this really the goal?
What’s better – to live to be 120, to stubbornly hang onto this mortal thresher, refusing to let go, like the final leaf on a dying autumn tree, or to die with glory, dignity, in a blaze of life and feeling. The Romans had a culture that dying in your old age – not doing anything – was dishonerable. And, we can see this culture today in a lot of places that aren’t America or Europe. Many Muslim cultures believe it is better to die for a cause then keep living. Japanese Kamikaze Pilots and whatnot.
Is this what nature intends for human beings? Why would nature provide us such vivid innate ambition at all if we were meant to die in a sterile hospital bed? I don’t know how I want to die but I know I don’t want to die in a hospital. When I die, I want confirmation, right before, that I will be embraced by something on the other side. And sometimes it feels like the only way to accomplish that is to be unhealthy, for the more unhealthy we are, the closer we are to death, we enter the proximity, we approach the perimeter of Deaths Territory. In a very subtle, invisible, abstract and counter-intuitive way, it’s thrilling to act unhealthy. It’s thrilling to smoke a cigarette. It’s thrilling to flirt with death. We like it.
It’s frustrating to be a human being. Our lives often feel like one big oxymoron. Everything is a catch-22. You eat more meat, then read a news story that meat is unhealthy. Eggs are my favorite source of protein and now there’s a shortage. They used to think Mercury was in Fish and it was killing the children. They say you can drink raw milk now. I know one thing for sure. I am still alive.
