MENS SANA in CORPORE SANO

When we love a song or just a simple sound we come across in Nature, when our being gets moved by a poem or just a line that resonates with how we think we are, when we move slowly across a landscape that thoroughly appeals to our senses and every step we take and every mile achieved become intrinsic pieces of the building blocks that pave the way to self-discovery, then life seems easy, because it is enjoyable when once again we feel we are becoming one with everything around us. The Universe feels closer to our comprehension and answers reveal themselves in all their glory, like waves of stars transforming an arduous journey across dimensions of ideas, reality, imaginings and dreams into the very experience we probably should call our collective lesson in this existence, the ever-changing organic shape we take within the earthly test. Administered to us through our quest for knowledge as conclusions to well-defined and -structured methodical processes or just as accidental epiphanies throughout the journey, these revelations are universal truths. Eventually, there is little importance attached to who discovered what and how, who said  some things and why. The universal truths start proving their immortality as soon as they get uncovered by humans, too. 

Such an undeniable truth is suggested by the phrase ”Mens Sana in Corpore Sano”. Allegedly millennia-old, ”a Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body” indicates perhaps how necessary it is for us to function as a unit. Acting in sync, we cannot really have one without the other. In order for us to reach the full potential of our earthly being, in the attempt to make our dreams come true and harmoniously – though not less painfully, as any forging process would have it – fulfil our destiny, the whole is very much required. It is our only duty, as all is one. (Only afterwards, viability, compatibility, timing, meaning, development, etc. can truly be discussed.)

Of course, that is the ultimate desideration, preferred ideal among the greatest goals. Life, too often, has different ideas.

”You should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body.
Ask for a stout heart that has no fear of death,
And deems length of days the least of Nature’s gifts
That can endure any kind of toil,
That knows neither wrath nor desire and thinks
The woes and hard labors of Hercules better than
The loves and banquets and downy cushions of Sardanapalus
What I commend to you, you can give to yourself;
For assuredly, the only road to a life of peace is virtue.”

Juvenal  (‘Satire X’, written in 120 A.D.)

  Lord Tennyson  (Ulysses, written in 1833 A.D.)

”Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”