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Some years ago I was standing in a conference hall in Barcelona, Spain — the European Society for Medical Oncology, one of the largest cancer congresses in the world. Among several thousand medical oncologists who had traded their white coats for suits, I was very nearly the only professor of exercise science in the room. The single line of affiliation printed on my badge always required explanation. I was not a full member of that society. Nor was I entirely a stranger to it. I was someone who climbed onto the podium and gave a talk, yet I was not family to that discipline. I stood somewhere in between — at the boundary.
In those days I often called to mind a poem by the poet Ham Min-bok.
On every boundary, flowers bloom
Standing on the boundary of moonlight and shadow,
I looked at the wall — Ham Min-bok, “Flower”
Writing a book about boundaries, I thought longest about that first line. Why is it precisely at the boundary that flowers bloom? A wall is the line that divides a house’s inside from its outside. And yet the poet saw a chrysanthemum blooming right on top of that line. The place that divides is the very place that blossoms. And it struck me, suddenly, that this was the place where I had always been standing.
I am an exercise scientist. I have studied the body all my life. Yet the place where I have worked has always been a boundary. Within the field of physical education I was the heretic who studied and researched medicine; to the field of medicine I was a professor from the physical education department. Between exercise science and medicine, between exercise and oncology — a place where I was fully at home on neither side. Perhaps you too have stood in such a place? A place that was lonely because you belonged completely to neither camp; a place that keeps making you ask, “Am I one of these people, or one of those?” Standing long in that in-between, I learned one thing: a boundary is not merely a line but a question. And, strangely enough, what grew me most was not the time spent safely inside, but the time spent always on that unsettling boundary.
The title of this piece is not a phrase of my own making. I received it from Professor Joo-Hwan Kim. He describes meditation as the work of standing at the boundary and beholding the boundary — standing in a place that is neither inside nor outside, and looking at the very line you have your feet on. When I first heard those words I stood still for a long while. It felt as though someone had given a name to the place where I had stood for so long.
Only, I walk on from there a little differently. He says that if you keep beholding in that way, the boundary blurs and widens until at last the distinction between self and world disappears. What I saw was different. For the one who goes all the way, the boundary does indeed collapse. But in the place where it collapsed, the next boundary rises. It breaks and widens, breaks again and widens again. The body grows that way, and so does a person. A boundary does not vanish; it is rebuilt every time. And so this book moves not toward the place where boundaries disappear, but toward the place where boundaries are alive.
This is a book about health. But I do not see health as a matter confined to the inside of the body. Watching people for many years at the bedside, I came to know something: health is neither inside nor outside. It is born anew, moment by moment, at the place where inside and outside meet. The cell, the smallest unit of our body, lives by a boundary called the membrane; the heart beats at the boundary of contraction and relaxation; the breath carries life at the boundary of drawing in and letting out. Health is not a state that sits still; it is an event that happens ceaselessly at the boundary. Every story in this book gathers, in the end, into a single sentence. Health is born at the boundary, as rhythm.
And yet we grade our lives far too quickly. Results mean success; no results, failure. Pass and it was a year well lived; fall short and it was a year lived wrong. How do you assess the year just past? It is a convenient binary, but it shrinks life far too narrowly. I believe our lives pass slowly through four places: survival, success, growth, and maturity. Survival is crossing today without collapsing; success is making a place for oneself within society; growth is enlarging one’s boundary by growing from within. And maturity is knowing not what more one can do, but what one will not do. This is not a ladder climbing upward. It is closer to a migration in which the center of gravity moves slowly from outside to inside, from speed to rhythm. And maturity holds one more place still: handing what I have received to the next person. This book goes, in the end, that far.
But a shadow follows this migration. Something that poses as growth and is not growth — namely, expansion. Sadly, our age today calls this shadow growth and exalts it. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han called the world we live in an achievement society. Where once someone pressed us from outside with “you must not,” now no one whips us. We whip ourselves. Repeating “I can” like a command, we burn ourselves up while believing we are free. This is why burnout is the illness of the most conscientious people. The one who never stopped, right to the end, one day sits down empty.
As someone who has studied exercise and health all his life, I want to name health as the place this illness has burrowed into most deeply. Today we want to be healthy more than ever. We measure, we record, we chase an ever-better body. Yet when asked, “Why do you want to be healthy?” the answer is surprisingly often empty. Health has become one more achievement. And when it does, there is no enough, so there is no stopping either. Paradoxically, the person most obsessed with health is often the person furthest from it. A truly healthy person lives forgetting his own body. Is it not usually when something hurts that we become vividly conscious of the body?
Expansion and growth look very much alike from the outside. Both get bigger. But a tree carving one more ring inside itself as it grows, and a balloon whose rubber skin thins as it swells, are entirely different events. A balloon is weakest at the moment it is largest. The deepest sickness of expansion lies in treating recovery as a sin — even though muscle is torn by exercise and grows by rest; even though what grows does so not while we strive but while we rest. A breath that only draws in and never lets out does not keep swelling; in the end it bursts.
These four places are not a staircase you climb once and are done with. A boundary does not vanish once crossed; it brings you to meet the same boundary again as a slightly different self. It is a spiral. The inferiority I felt in middle school, classified as one of the poor students, and the feeling I have today when a grant proposal is turned down, are astonishingly the same. “Am I this side or that side? Where do I belong?” That question itself is the boundary. So there is nothing to be ashamed of. To be still standing before that question means we are still on the road.
This book is a journey along that boundary, and it is made of five steps. First we diagnose this age that only swells (Part One), and we gain eyes to read what a boundary really is (Part Two). Then we learn that when that boundary enters time it becomes rhythm (Part Three), and we look at the place where new things are born upon that rhythm (Part Four). And finally we ask how the boundary so gained is handed to the next person (Part Five). From diagnosis to principle, from principle to rhythm, from rhythm to generation, from generation to succession. Wishing that we may grow rather than swell, that we may rest within relationship rather than burn alone, and that having grown, we may hand it on.
If one philosopher has named this age’s illness precisely, I would like to answer alongside him in the language of the body — from the bedside, how health is born again.
Health is born at the boundary, as rhythm.
This one sentence is the whole of this book. Everything else is that sentence unfolded into stories. I still want to widen my boundary. Only now I ask more often for alignment than for speed, for endurance than for achievement, for meaning than for proof. And so today I pause a while. The Native peoples are said to have put it this way: if you run too fast your soul cannot keep up, so you must stop a while and wait for your soul. It is from that place that I begin this writing. Now, let us go together into the story of the boundary.
Notes for this chapter
Ham Min-bok, “Flower” (On Every Boundary, Flowers Bloom) · Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society · Joo-Hwan Kim’s discussion of the boundary