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A few years ago, I stood in a conference hall in Barcelona, Spain. It was one of the largest cancer congresses in the world, the European Society for Medical Oncology. Among thousands of medical oncologists who had traded their white coats for suits, I was very nearly the only professor of kinesiology. As I stepped down from the podium after my presentation, someone glanced at my name badge, smiled, and asked, "What brings a physical education teacher here?" There was no malice in it. He was simply curious, no doubt. And yet, strangely, that one remark stayed with me for a long time. I was not a full member of that congress. But neither was I a complete stranger. I was standing somewhere in between, at the boundary.
Around that time I often found myself recalling a poem by the poet Ham Min-bok.
The blooming of the flower is not the flower
Nor is the falling of the flower the flower
The place where it blooms and falls—that is the flower — Ham Min-bok, "Flower"
Writing a book about boundaries, I dwelt longest on these three lines. If neither the blooming nor the falling is the flower, then where, after all, is the flower? In the very place where it blooms and falls. In the in-between where the two meet. And suddenly I realized that I had always stood in just such a place.
I am a kinesiologist. All my life I have studied the body. Yet the place where I have worked has always been a boundary. From one side they said, "But you're a physical education teacher"; from the other, "But you don't know medicine." Between kinesiology and medicine, between exercise and oncology, a place where I was a full member of neither household. Have you, too, never stood in such a place? A place where you were lonely for belonging fully to no side, a place that made you ask, again and again, "Am I one of these people, or one of those?" Standing long in that in-between, I learned one thing: that a boundary is not merely a line but a question. And, curiously, what made me grow the most was not the time spent safely inside, but the time spent always at that uneasy boundary.
This is a book about health. And yet I do not see health as a matter of the body's interior alone. Long years at the bedside, watching over people, taught me something: health is neither inside nor outside. It is born anew, at every moment, in the place where inside and outside meet. The cell, the smallest unit of our body, lives by the boundary we call the membrane; the heart beats at the boundary of contraction and release; the breath sustains life at the boundary of breathing in and breathing out. Health is not a state of standing still but an event forever taking place 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 score our lives too quickly. Achievement means success; its absence, failure. Pass, and it was a year well lived; fall short, and it was a year lived wrongly. How do you judge the year just past? A convenient dichotomy, but it shrinks life far too narrowly. I believe our lives pass slowly through four places. Survival, success, growth, and, finally, maturity. Survival is crossing today without collapsing; success is making a place for oneself within society; growth is being filled from within so that one's boundary widens. And maturity is knowing not what more one can do, but what one will not do. This is no ladder climbing upward. It is closer to a shift of the center of gravity, moving slowly from outside to inside, from speed to rhythm.
And this shift is shadowed by something. Something that pretends to be growth but is not: expansion. Sadly, our age calls this shadow growth and exalts it. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han called the world we live in the achievement society. Once, someone from outside pressed down on us with a "you must not"; now, no one whips us. We whip ourselves. Reciting "you can" like a command, believing ourselves free, we burn ourselves out. Here is why burnout is the illness of the most diligent. The one who never stopped, right to the end, one day sits down, utterly emptied.
As one who has studied exercise and health all his life, I want to hold up health as the very place this illness has burrowed deepest. Today we long to be healthy as never before. We measure, we record, we chase endlessly after a better body. Yet ask "why do you want to be healthy," and surprisingly often the answer is empty. Health has become one more achievement. And where there is no enough, there can be no stopping. Paradoxically, those most obsessed with health are often the ones furthest from it. The truly healthy live forgetting their own bodies. Is it not usually when something hurts that we grow keenly aware of the body?
Expansion and growth look so alike on the surface. Both grow larger. But a tree carving one more ring within itself as it grows, and a balloon whose rubber skin thins as it swells, are entirely different things. A balloon is weakest at its fullest. The deepest disease of expansion lies in treating recovery as a kind of sin. Muscle is torn by exercise and grows by rest; what grows does so not while straining but while resting, and yet we forget this. A breath that only draws in and knows not how to let out does not keep swelling; in the end, it bursts.
These four places are not a staircase that ends once climbed. A boundary is not something that vanishes once crossed; it lets a slightly altered self meet the same boundary again. It is a spiral. The inferiority I felt when I was sorted among the poor students in middle school, and the feeling of being rejected in a research-grant review today, are astonishingly the same. "Am I this side, or that? Where do I belong?" That very question 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. First we diagnose the age of expansion, then gain eyes to read the boundary, then learn how the boundary becomes rhythm within time, and finally behold together how the new is born at that boundary. Wishing that we might not swell but grow, not burn out alone but rest within relationship. If a German philosopher named the illness of this age precisely, then beside him I would like to answer in the language of the body. How, at the bedside, health is born again.
Health is born at the boundary, as rhythm.
This one sentence is the whole of this book. All the rest is but that sentence unfolded into stories. Even now I want to widen my boundary. Only, now I ask more often for alignment over speed, endurance over achievement, meaning over proof. And so today I stop for a while. The Indians said, did they not, that if you run too fast your soul cannot keep up, and so you must pause a while and wait for your soul. It is from that place that I begin these pages. Come, now let us enter together into the story of the boundary.
References
Ham Min-bok, "Flower" · Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society