What “The Secret Garden” can teach you about True Health

Fresh Air, Boredom, Laughter and Currant Buns

One form of knowledge that is always enticing to people is how to live not only a longer life, but a life full of more health and vitality.

Health-obsessed podcasters like Peter Attia and Tim Ferris called this “the healthspan” back when Rhonda Patrick episodes blared in my ears during long hours doing lab-work at the University in the 2010s. They obsessed over metrics like VO2 Max and fast twitch muscle fibre density and insulin sensitivity. They talked about MTOR and C-reactive protein.

Mortality is a subject that people respond to differently; I once believed that if I could only have all the right information, I could prevent or cure anyone I loved from any disease. But for every material puzzle that we solve, there are a thousand more than we don’t even know about.

All of these words might be jargon to you but they occupied my mind a lot in those days. This obsession then lead me to read the works of people like Thomas Cowan, Aajonous Vonderplanitz, Raymond Peat and many other esoteric health niches that teach their own set of philosophies about what it is that helps a person stay healthy when so much “mainstream advice” is insalubrious to say the least.

It has created an absolute sense of anxiety in my generation that was not just unique to me. We parse labels with a magnifying glass on our shampoo, on our coffee, to see if there isn’t something there secretly trying to poison us. We have grown so good at analysing leaves, we have forget what the forest feels like.

Vitality is a very different kind of metric than mere health and I wasn’t expecting to find the answers to my questions in a children’s book.