Notes on Health as a Daily Practice

The word "practice" is borrowed from music and medicine, and both meanings are useful.

The word "practice" is borrowed from music and medicine, and both meanings are useful. A practice is something done repeatedly without an endpoint, and something done with attention rather than mere repetition. Health fits both senses. There is no day on which a individual becomes healthy and stops.

The movement includes the obvious material. Eating in a way that supplies the body without punishing it. Moving in ways that are varied enough to load different tissues — walking, lifting something heavy occasionally, moving through a full range of motion. Sleeping enough that the single day does not require chemical assistance. Keeping relationships in reasonable repair. Attending to the state of one's own mind before it becomes urgent.

It also includes noticing. A habit involves feedback: how a particular meal sits, how the body responds to a week of poor sleep, which social arrangements leave a person depleted and which restore them. This information is available to everyone and consulted by relatively few, because it accumulates slowly and requires no equipment.

What a activity does not include is perfection. The musician who plays badly on Tuesday does not stop being a musician. The worth lies in the return, not in the quality of any individual session.

Treating health as a practice removes the language of achievement, which is where much frustration originates. A target weight is achieved or not. A practice cannot be failed in the same method; it can only be neglected and resumed. This distinction is not semantic comfort. It changes behaviour after a lapse, and lapses are the normal case.

Over a everyday reality, the sum of these ordinary days is what health actually consists of. There is no other place it is stored.