Well, maybe, maybe not.
Maybe you don't have an illness right now, but maybe you're engaging in habits.
You're not living in a very healthy way, and
so you may develop the disease in the near future.
Maybe you're not eating your vegetables like you should.
Maybe you're not sleeping well enough or getting the exercise that you should.
What if you go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist?
And that person gives you all kinds of
test to see whether you have any kind of mental illness.
And it turns out that you don't have any diagnosable mental illness.
Does that mean you're mentally healthy?
Well, again, not necessarily, right?
Who among us couldn't do better about managing those doubts and
voices that arise in our heads, sometimes late at night or
early in the morning about our competence or what it is that we're doing in life.
And who among us couldn't do better in
developing relationships with other people into personal skills, and so on.
So just because we don't have a mental illness doesn't necessarily mean
we're mentally healthy or not as healthy as we could be mentally.
This is something that the World Health Organization had in mind way back
in 1948 when they developed a definition of health.
They defined health as a state of complete physical, mental,
and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
So, think about this from another perspective as well,
I think this will help to the case too.
I don't know how many of you have had experiences with gardens.
But when I was a child my family and I had a garden at my grandparent's farm.
And so on the weekends we would travel out to the garden and work in that garden.
We planted, we had corn, and we had zucchini, and
tomatoes, and asparagus, and so on, and so forth.
Now, if we didn't have a green cape.
If all we did was pull out weeds, but we never planted those seeds for
those vegetables, we wouldn't have a garden.
We'd just have a plot of dirt.
So for a garden to flourish, you have to have a green cape, and plant the seeds.
Similarly for human beings to flourish we have to have a green cape.
Okay, so here is another question for you.
Can you flourish without a red cape?