What does Health mean to you?

As far as I can remember, for the longest time I thought of health as a condition wherein you don't need any medication, you call yourself disease-free, and to say the least, you keep yourself out of the hospital. That’s that. Nothing more, nothing less. Everything you need to call yourself healthy was neatly encapsulated for me in this definition. Until this well-rooted idea was challenged one day.

It's the September of 2016. My brother has graduated a year ago and I am beginning to settle at work. We siblings are looking forward to our upcoming years. We are excited to excel in our careers, super mindful of having won the parent lottery, and are keen to make our parents experience the joys they deserve. We have conventional dreams, but they are occupying an unconventional place in our lives. Our dreams are anchoring us. They are lending a purpose to our living.

It's in these times of hope and anticipation that my father is diagnosed with cancer. It is a preventable cancer but now it is at its terminal stage. All we understand is that within a few months he’ll be gone.

And it’s 2016. We have barely begun to live for our aspirations. My brother and I want to do so much with our lives. My mother who has put in all the hard work of raising us, is hopeful about our dreams turning into a reality. We want to witness all those moments and more importantly we want to witness them together. But that one diagnosis has now changed everything.

This was not the plan for my life. This was not what anyone of us had thought of.

In business we often talk of opportunity costs. We spend hours evaluating decisions we make to know the potential benefits the business misses out on when choosing one alternative over the other. What else could we have done with the resources is a question that lies at the core of all the decisions we take. Each time we choose one option over the other, we have lost out on something. To say that the opportunity cost pervades every facet of life is not wrong, but we rarely extend that analogy to everything we do and don’t do for our health. Every time we make choices that push aside our health, we continue with our lives, ignorant of the incurred opportunity cost.

September of 2016 showed us the opportunity cost we were to bear. The cost of not having my father around when my brother earns his masters from his dream university. The cost of not having my father around when I publish my first book. The cost of not having him in all the small joys of our lives.

It’s a cost we continue to pay even to this day, and on some days it gets unbearable.?

Why a newsletter dedicated to preventive healthcare?

It’s obvious that my advocacy for preventive healthcare stems from personal space. I did lose my father to cancer, but I also belong to a family of two cancer survivors who made it only because of early diagnosis. I have experienced how preventive healthcare can change lives and my work in healthcare has shown that most diseases can be prevented in the first place.

The idea of a newsletter comes with a big audacious goal in mind. I want to inform my readers of preventable diseases and the ways they can prevent them. I want them to be proactive and not reactive about their health. I want them to prioritize their health. In short, I want to change the way my readers look at their health.?

Why the name Thrive?

Coming up with a name that captured my newsletter’s spirit was perhaps the most interesting part of starting this initiative. Every discussion or brainstorming I had with friends and family made it clear that the name should reflect the power of prevention and what happens when we adopt it.

With that singular focus, we closed on ‘Thrive: Voice of Prevention.’ The word Thrive has a positive vibe to it in varying contexts. When you’re financially well-placed in life, you thrive. When your values and careers are aligned, you thrive. When you have happy and fulfilling relationships, you thrive. And when you place prevention at the heart of your health, you Thrive!

How will Thrive add value to you?

When I started gathering my thoughts to bring the newsletter to life, I realized how na?ve and perhaps ignorant I was to have the ambition to take on a task of this magnitude. Prevention is everyone’s business and there is so much to be done. Individuals, families, communities, employers, charities, and the local and national government, all have a role to play.

And I want my newsletter to bring together these stakeholders to make a big difference to our ability to live well and not just live long. ?

So what does Health really mean to you?

Coming back to we where it all started.

‘Health’ of course has a definition we can look up for on the internet. But it’s not a word as simple and direct as it appears to be. To be able to reimagine the meaning of health, I believe is a journey in itself. A journey I hope all of you embark upon sooner than later.

On this #WorldHealthDay, I wish you great health as you rediscover your relationship with health and end up with a definition that is accurate and meaningful to you.