Whether it’s in the area of medicine, nutrition, personal relationships or politics, real health is a matter of harmony. Harmony is defined as the pleasing combination of elements to form a whole. The obvious example is in music, where notes combine to form a chord.

In our chaotic and unpredictable world, we often experience occasions of disharmony. But in fact, scientists and mathematicians who study chaos have found that it also generates the complex and breathtakingly beautiful patterns of our natural world.

In our pursuit of health we make the mistake of looking for magic bullets, for single elements in place of the “pleasing combination of elements” that is harmony. Our Western medical model is largely fixated on pharmaceutical magic bullets, and popular ads tout the miracle nutrient, the revolutionary new diet, the secret Chinese remedy, the two-minute exercise program that gives you buns of steel.

But no one single element alone creates harmony. Antioxidants play a starring role in quenching the free radicals that lead to cancer and premature aging, but it would be a disaster if they completely succeeded, because even free radicals have their place in producing energy and fighting infections.

Our safest assumption is that if something exists in our bodies or in our lives, it has a purpose. Our challenge is to recognize the role of each element, each ingredient in our recipe for health, to bring it into balance and to integrate it into the wholeness of a healthy life.

Balance is too small a goal. Why settle for 50-50 when you can both have 200 percent? That’s the power of effective communication and successful teams. So too, nutrients work as synergists; without each other, they’re nothing.

We also make the mistake of thinking that harmony is a static state that we can own and keep. But life is movement.

Using our hearts and minds, our reason and intuition, we can move beyond the conflicts, the extremes, the fragmentation of our lives, and toward a more pleasing combination of elements that form a whole.