Je vais bien.

Celine Dion sang 25 songs in Paris on Saturday night — her first full concert in 2,379 days, with a disease that attacks the throat. She told the crowd three words: "I'm doing fine."

The last time Celine Dion played a full concert was March 8, 2020. In 2022 she was diagnosed with stiff person syndrome, a rare neurological disease that stiffens the muscles and sets off spasms — including in the throat she'd been singing with since she was five. She canceled a world tour and went quiet. Two years ago she sang one song from the Eiffel Tower and the world called it a comeback. But one song is four minutes. On Saturday, at an arena in Nanterre, west of Paris, she had to do it 25 times, for two hours and fifteen minutes, in front of some 30,000 people — and then get up and do it again Wednesday. The run is 16 shows in five weeks, with ten more booked for next May.

She cried before she finished the first song. "I promised myself I wouldn't cry," she said, and the crowd sang her through it. The AP's reporter in the room wrote that the voice has lost some of its top, and that every big note is now a decision she makes in public. For the encore she saved "All By Myself," hit the high note, held it, and turned to look at her band as if to check it had really happened. She's 58. The disease can be triggered by loud noise, touch, and emotional stress, and a sold-out arena is all three at once.

Two thousand three hundred and seventy-nine days, and then 25 songs. Let's see what wisdom says.

The freedom you don't notice

Bronnie Ware nursed the dying for years and wrote down what they regretted. Buried inside the most common regret of all is a sentence I think about more than the regret itself:

"Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it."— Bronnie Ware, Regrets of the Dying · read it with plain notes in the library

Her patients meant walks, friends, the years they'd assumed were still coming. The window closes earlier than the calendar says — not at death, but the day your body quietly withdraws its permission. Dion had hers withdrawn at 51, in front of everyone. Then some of it came back, and look what she did with it: spent it, all of it, immediately, on the one thing the disease specifically attacks. Most of us treat a working body the way we treat tap water. She's been without it long enough to treat it like the last bottle in the house.

A shaking hand

I've written before about my father's letter — the wisdom he wrote me in June 2011, eight weeks before he died at fifty. What I haven't said much about is the handwriting. He wrote it with a shaking hand, and you can see it on the page. I used to read past that, straight to the words. Now I think the shaking is part of the message: proof that each sentence cost something to put down, and he put it down anyway. That's what I heard in the AP line about every note being a decision. A steady hand writes without thinking. A shaking one chooses every word. The words are worth more, not less.

A merry heart

Solomon has a short line for what happened at the encore:

"A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones."— Proverbs 17:22 · read it with plain notes in the Solomon collection

He's not prescribing anything, and neither am I — a merry heart doesn't cure a neurological disease. But he is describing something visible from the cheap seats on Saturday. She reached the note, fanned herself, and laughed at her own relief. The disease had been the fact of her life for four years; for one bar of music, the joy was the bigger fact. Ware's patients said the same from the other end — years of pretending to be content while longing, in her words, to laugh properly again. The spirit and the bones are not separate departments.

So — was wisdom applied?

The charitable reading writes itself. She was told the thing she was made for would strangle her, and she did it for two hours and booked 25 more nights. She said she'd learned to live with the fragility and made it her reason to keep going. That's close to a textbook answer to Ware's sentence: notice the freedom while you have it, and use it.

The unsentimental reading is in the same report. Sixteen shows in five weeks is punishing for a healthy singer, and she's chosen to stand inside noise, touch, and stress, on purpose, twenty-six times. There's a lot of money in that arena, and a lot of livelihoods that depend on her walking out Wednesday. Is that courage, or a body being spent faster than it should be? I can see it both ways, and I'd rather tell you that than pretend to a verdict from my sofa. Only she knows what Sunday morning felt like.

The kitchen-table version is smaller than Paris. "Je vais bien" — I'm doing fine — is what all of us say, most days, without checking. She earned hers over 2,379 days. So today, pick one thing your body still lets you do that you've stopped doing — the walk, the drive to the friend, the song in the car — and do it once, on purpose, while the permission holds. No ovation. Just the thing itself, which Ware's patients would tell you is the better prize.

Wisdom Watch takes the day's loudest story and asks what the wise would say — no politics, no predictions, no advice. Just the long view. Everything quoted here is real and sourced; the full texts live in the library.