In Brief
Many people live in the gray zone between sickness and wellness: not diagnosable, not well. Alice’s story exemplifies this—declared cancer-free, but exhausted, foggy, sleepless.
Health is not the absence of disease but the presence of something richer—resilience, rhythm, the capacity to fall out of step and find balance again.
The hero’s journey offers a map: health as an ongoing quest rather than a destination, requiring us to cross the threshold from “normal” to whole.
Alice hasn’t completed her “return,” but she carries wisdom: survival is not the same as health, and “normal” is not the same as whole.
True health is the presence of rhythm—when a life can fall out of step and then find its way back, you have room to live rather than just survive.
A Hero’s Journey to Wholeness
Alice’s question echoes in the space where medicine ends and mystery begins: if health is not the absence of disease, what is it? Her scans are clear, her cancer markers undetectable, her treatment a medical triumph. Yet her days unfold as a stranger in her own body, navigating symptoms that don’t fit diagnostic categories and searching for answers to questions that span the boundaries of medical specialties.
We live in a time when the word health is everywhere—splashed across magazine covers, promised by supplements, dissected in medical journals. We talk about “healthcare systems,” “public health,” “mental health,” “self-care.” Yet for all its ubiquity, the word itself remains strangely hollow.
Ask a hundred people what health means, and you’ll get a hundred different answers. For some, it means “not being sick.” For others, it means energy and fitness, or being able to do the things they love. For still others, it’s a set of lab values: cholesterol under control, blood sugar in range, blood pressure where it should be.
But beneath those surface definitions, a deeper question stirs: Is health just the absence of disease? Is it something we either “have” or “don’t have”? Or is it something richer—a way of living, a process, even a journey?
This question matters urgently right now. More and more people are living in the gray zone between sickness and wellness, like Alice. They don’t have a diagnosis, but they don’t feel well. They’re exhausted, restless, foggy, burned out. Their doctors may reassure them that “everything looks fine,” but their bodies tell a different story.
Perhaps the best way to make sense of this deeper truth is through one of humanity’s oldest maps: the hero’s journey.
The Call to Adventure: When Something Feels “Off”
In every myth, the hero begins in an ordinary world—a familiar life where something quietly feels wrong. Then comes the call to adventure.
For Alice, that call came at the very moment she should have felt triumphant. Her cancer was gone. The scans were clear. Her doctors declared success. And yet, she knew something was deeply off. She was exhausted, foggy, anxious, sleepless. Her weight had climbed, her body ached, and she felt hypersensitive to foods, smells, even changes in the weather. “I don’t recognize myself anymore,” she told us.
Alice’s call to adventure was the recognition that survival is not the same as health.
For many others, that call comes as a whisper in the body:
“I feel just a little off.”
“My energy isn’t what it used to be.”
“My sleep is restless, and I wake up unrefreshed.”
“My mind feels foggy—like I’m not fully myself.”
What unites these experiences is a profound knowing that something isn’t working as it should. This knowing becomes their call to adventure, pulling them from the ordinary world of “getting by” into a quest for something deeper: true health.
The Ordinary World: The Limits of “Normal”
In the ordinary world of conventional medicine, Alice was fine. Her cancer was gone. Her thyroid medication brought her lab numbers into the “normal” range. Her blood sugar was not yet diabetic.
And yet she didn’t feel fine.
This is the paradox so many face: medicine says they are healthy, but their lived experience tells a different story. For Alice, every day was a reminder that normal numbers did not equal a normal life.
When these seekers see their doctors, undergo physical exams, and get standard bloodwork, the results often come back: normal. Maybe there are small findings—blood sugar creeping above ideal ranges, cholesterol numbers edging higher than expected. But the guidance remains limited: “watch and wait” or “try a few lifestyle tweaks.”
For someone who feels deeply unwell, this answer can feel like being told their quest isn’t real. The medical reassurance—”everything looks fine”—does not match their lived experience of imbalance.
So they find themselves in the gap between two worlds—one that insists they are healthy, and another where they know they are not thriving. Their lingering question is the one every hero faces at the threshold:
If nothing is wrong, why don’t I feel right?
Crossing the Threshold: A Different Kind of Map
To move forward, Alice—and all of us—must cross a threshold. We must be willing to ask a different kind of question:
What if health is not the absence of illness, but the presence of something else?
Across cultures, healing traditions have offered richer maps. Chinese medicine describes health as harmony and flow. Indigenous traditions often understand illness and recovery as rites of passage. Even in Western culture, we instinctively reach for journey language: we “battle” cancer, “recover” from surgery, or “overcome” depression.
Alice’s story invites us to reclaim that deeper sense of health—not just numbers on a lab report, but a process, a relationship, a movement toward wholeness.
Trials and Revelations: What Alice’s Story Reveals
Every hero faces trials—obstacles that reveal new truths. For Alice, those trials were the relentless symptoms that accumulated long after her cancer treatment ended: fatigue, insomnia, brain fog, anxiety, neuropathy, autoimmune disease, weight gain. Each new problem sent her to yet another specialist, yet none could explain how the pieces fit together.
The trial revealed the deeper truth: illness is not just a broken part. It is a disorder of the whole. And health is not static perfection, but the ability to adapt, to respond, to recover.
Consider the symptoms that don’t neatly fit a diagnosis: the exhaustion that leaves you collapsing after work, too depleted to engage with loved ones. The migraines, anxiety, and digestive trouble that specialists treat separately but that feel connected. The body speaking a language no one else seems to be listening to.
These trials reveal a profound truth: the body is not a machine with isolated parts. It is a living system of communication and relationship. Organs talk to one another. Hormones rise and fall in rhythm. The immune system shifts from defense to rest.
The Deeper Truth: Health as Relationship
Perhaps the most profound revelation of Alice’s journey is that her body is not a machine with isolated parts. It is a living system of communication and relationship. Organs talk to one another. Hormones rise and fall in rhythm. The immune system shifts from defense to rest.
In Chinese medicine, this is described as qi flowing, yin and yang in harmony, organ networks moving in synchrony. In modern science, we speak of regulation, resilience, and dynamic equilibrium. Different languages, same insight: imbalance begins long before disease, and health is the dance of restoration.
Alice’s suffering shows what happens when those relationships break down—and points toward a new way of seeing health, not as a binary state, but as a living, dynamic process.
Return with Wisdom (and Unfinished Work)
In every myth, the hero eventually returns from the journey, bearing wisdom. Alice has not yet completed that return. She is still searching, still yearning for answers. But her story carries wisdom nonetheless: survival is not the same as health, and “normal” is not the same as whole.
The return in a hero’s journey is never a return to before. It is a return with something carried back. Alice’s story already carries a clear wisdom that can guide us all: health is not static perfection, but resilience—the capacity to fall out of step and find our rhythm again.
Though Alice has not yet completed her full return, she has begun to glimpse what this wisdom means. In her moments of noticing—when her hands warm slightly, when a night’s sleep feels a degree deeper, when the morning pause between waking and rising feels less fragile—she is learning that health is not about erasing difficulty, but about learning to live in deeper relationship with herself and her body’s language.
The Ongoing Quest
And just like the hero’s journey, the journey of health never really ends. Life will always bring stress, challenge, and change. Some days we feel aligned, other days off-kilter. The task is not to achieve a flawless state, but to listen, to learn, and to keep returning.
This is the invitation of health: to see ourselves not as machines to be tuned up only when they break, but as living systems to be nurtured, adapted, and renewed.
For Alice, and for all of us, true health becomes not a possession but a practice. It is the ability to fall out of step—and to find our rhythm again. You can hear it when a nervous system settles after it spikes. You can see it when, after a hard week, sleep finally does its work. You can trace it in trajectories that change by degrees instead of lurching from edge to edge.
This is why so many people say, “I want my life back.” They are not asking for perfect numbers. They are asking for coherence. Morning to feel like a beginning. Food to leave them steadier. Energy to rise and fall in a way that makes sense. Mood to behave like weather, not climate. This is not vague. It is ordinary life, becoming trustworthy again.
Health is not the absence of disease. It is the presence of rhythm. When a life can fall out of step and then find its way back, you do not have to fear every stumble or live at the cliff’s edge of a lab range. You have room. That room is what we are trying to return to Alice, and to anyone who recognizes themselves in her story.
What Comes Next
Alice’s journey reminds us that health is not a destination but a path. In the next post, we’ll turn to the question that naturally follows:
What does it mean to be in balance?
If health is a journey, then balance is one of its guiding stars. But balance itself is not simple. It is not a static point, but a living, dynamic process.
For Alice, balance was exactly what felt missing. Despite the absence of cancer, her body felt like a storm out of rhythm. In the next essay, we’ll explore what balance really means—and why restoring it may be the most essential work of all.