WEALTH / HEALTH: to be or not to be

El Colegio del Cuerpo. Photo courtesy Alvaro Restrepo.

By Álvaro Restrepo, Founder and Director, El Colegio del Cuerpo; Rapoport Center Advisory Board Member

[English translation; Spanish original published in El Espectador, April 20, 2020, available here.]

Not only would I like the words “health” and “wealth” to rhyme in Spanish, as they rhyme in English, but also that they could be named in only one word…whealth, perhaps? Just as the Cherokee had only one word to designate peace and law. Also, I would like English to have two verbs for “being” (to be), as we do in Spanish, to express the difference between “being” (ser) and “being-now” (estar). (I woke up today in my Caribbean confinement, full of linguistic wishes, questions, intuitions….)

Let me explain, beginning with the second point:

Soy pobre (in Spanish), I am poor.

Estoy pobre (in Spanish), I am poor NOW.

If I say in Spanish “soy bruto,” I am stupid, it means that I am always stupid; it is my permanent state, my nature. If, on the contrary, I say “estoy bruto,” it means that I woke up today not very present, not very clever…but that I am not always like this. In many other languages (including English), this subtle and significant difference does not exist.

In El Colegio del Cuerpo (The School of the Body) in Cartagena, Colombia, we have “forbidden” our kids, many of them coming from the most deprived areas of this very unequal city, to say I AM poor (Yo soy pobre). We consider this a form of self-stigmatization. Something similar happens with Colombia’s socioeconomic strata classifications (1-6), which have become almost a caste system: “my family is strata 2″ rather than “my family lives in a strata 2 neighborhood.” That is why one of our school’s main slogans is: the students of El Colegio del Cuerpo belong to strata T, strata TALENT. If I am born being (siendo) poor I will die poor. If I am born being NOW (estando) poor, my situation can change. To be or not to be, that is the question.

Another notion in English that interests me a lot is Commonwealth, which literally means the wealth shared by all. We are living in times when we should be speaking of Commonhealth…or even better, Commonwhealth. Which is to say that the only real, legitimate, moral/ethical form of wealth is (or should be) health. We are now appreciating this fact more than ever. Without health there is no body, and without body there is no life, no dignity, and without dignity there is no wealth (and therefore no economy). The health of our body (our individual/collective body) is the only thing that really matters. Health is the supreme value. This “egalitarian” virus, as it has been described, has for now attacked with greater virulence the richest of the richest: China, the USA, Italy, Spain, France, the UK. Six of our body’s most powerful organs were among the first hardest-hit victims

Another linguistic difference that we do not cherish enough is that between “having” (to possess) and “being”: “I have a body” versus “I am a body.” My only real belonging is my own body. This is what we try to convey to our students, who supposedly have nothing but who are rich with talent, internal and external beauty, and potential. I constantly challenge them: “I am the wealthiest man in the world: I have everything but I possess nothing.” “In this world there are people who are so poor that the only thing they have is money.” “You do not come here to learn how to dance, as that is something you have known how to do since before you were born.  You come here to learn to think and to elaborate another vision/notion of wealth (whealth), in a society that values having more than being.”

Empty Hands Dance Theatre was the name of our dance company in New York, with my master/partner Cho Kyoo Hyun. “We come to this world with empty hands…we leave with empty hands,” was his Buddhist comprehension of life. In the post-Coronavirus era we will have to return to the Being—to health understood as peace among the organs, and to prevention, common sense, interdependence, co-responsibility. Only these values can guide us as a species.

In Spanish, I would like to find a similar neologism as whealth. I heard the other day in a movie a sentence that remained deep in my spirit: “The opposite of poverty is not wealth…it is justice.” Even more, I tend to embrace the word dignity, understood as a form of holistic – individual and social – health: physical, mental, spiritual!

The opposite of illness is not health: it is dignity.

To be (now) or not to be; to be or not to have; to have or not to be…etc…these are today’s fundamental questions.

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Adenda

It is not a coincidence that the initials for The World Health Organization is The Who (as the iconic English rock group). In Spanish the initials for Organización Mundial de la Salud are OMS, almost like a yoga mantra for meditation….