“We can clock out of a job, but we can’t clock out of our health,” my friend Kaki Okumura writes in her book Wa — The Art of Balance. We understand that we’ll spend almost half of our waking lives at work, she says, and so naturally, we ask a lot of questions about it. Questions like:
“What is my dream job? What kind of career and position will grant me freedom and fulfillment? How can I find this while still making a living that can sustain my lifestyle?”
“We don’t ask the same questions or revisit them with the same frequency and level of reflection as we do our career, but our health is just as impactful, if not more,” Kaki continues. We may spend 50% of our lives at work, but we spend 100% of it in our state of health — however poor or prosperous that state might be. Why not afford it the same level of intention? Well, today, let’s!
What is your dream health? What kind of physical and mental condition will grant you freedom and fulfillment? How can you find it while still making a living, prioritizing your other values, and pursuing all the physical and mental activities you want to enjoy?
Like the challenges with our careers, the questions about our health are worth revisiting, Kaki thinks. “A dream job at one point in our life is not a dream job at another.” And just like figuring out our way through the working world, the prompts about our wellbeing do not come with stock answers. As another author trying to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western culture once wrote: “Independent inquiry is needed in your search for truth, not dependence on anyone else’s view or a mere book.”
That author was Bruce Lee, and though he knew books were not the end of it, I believe he’d have thought Kaki’s a good place to start.
