The Key to Life is Being Healthy

Many people confuse young as "healthy," and old as "dying," when that is not necessarily true.  One can be "unhealthy" at any age -- and healthy at any age as well, which doesn't necessarily mean one will live forever.  In fact, the best way to ensure that one will not be exposed to any risks that might jeopardize their life (and health), is to lock them up so that they will never ride in a car, ride a bike, or swim in the ocean -- which is to eliminate the risks of living a life of experiences -- in favor of just being kept safely, so one will live as long as possible -- without any experiences or participation in what most would regard as a meaningful and rich existence.

So when one of the original founders of the American Experience and culture said, "Give me liberty or give me death," he is in effect remarking, that only a life in freedom (to live and experience a full life), is worth living -- and not just living without that enrichment and engagement.  Thus, people frequently remark when one has met a premature death, "that they died doing what they loved doing," implying that they died happily, living the life they wanted to live -- and died that way also.  That is a fact of life, and nothing will guarantee that a specific individual's life will go on forever, no matter what precautions one takes, how much life or medical insurance one has -- because that is the very nature of that which is living -- that it also will die.

Otherwise, there is no "life," to that which can never die.  It always was, and always will be -- unchanging -- neither getting better or worse, but always staying the same no matter what.  Life is not like that -- at least individual lives are not like that -- and those changes individually, cause all of life to change as well, and so it matters if we individually get better or worse.

Getting worse, is actually the process of cutting oneself off from the rest of life -- so one no longer effectively participates, or engages life with any others.  They are isolated in their little shells and cocoons -- in order to remain completely "safe."  Becoming unhealthy and "disabled," also keeps one safe in this way -- of being excused from full participation, so that one "cannot" -- because of some convenient excuse -- that one is not in the condition to...

That doesn't mean that one has to take up skydiving or scuba diving -- to live fully, unless those fascinations particularly appeal to one, and they will not feel fulfilled until they have checked those experiences off their "to do" lists -- before they die.  There are plenty of others to engage in, and if nothing still appeals, there is always the search further, as an activity in itself.  If that quest is fruitful, then it becomes a viable alternative for where the rest of life can also go -- if it indeed makes compelling good sense to do so.  That is the value of individual choice and action -- that it creates a precedence for where the rest of life may go -- which none may have even thought about before.

Of course, one will never do so, if one is dependent on the approval and applause of every one else to guide them on what that might be -- because obviously, if the others knew, or appreciated it, they would be there doing it first.  So those paths, will be well-trodden -- and crowded, but for those who rely on the crowds to lead them where to go -- they will obviously not be the first there -- though they may consume their entire lives thinking to get there.

If one is not sure where one is heading, the best they can do, is to be as healthy and fit for whatever comes along -- so they are prepared to go where they have to, and not so their condition excuses them -- from everr having to rise to any challenges ever again.  That would be dying to living, and all the disastrous consequences that follow.  Rather than our fates being inevitable, for most, it is the choices and actions we take, that make our lives the way it is.

One has to choose health at the very beginning, and not at the end, when it is already too late to make any difference.  That is the most important lesson one should teach the young -- as well as the old, and not that the old should just give up already and die -- because that dying, may consume entire lives lived that way.  But the person who is healthy, makes all the right choices -- because they can, and that's what they have to do -- to manifest that health.  The sick person will not choose health, but will choose their sickness -- and that is what makes them sick.