In this paper, we examine physical education’s entanglements with notions of the healthy nation, healthy lifestyles, and the healthy body by drawing on detailed histories of the subject. Central to the examination are Kirk’s analyses, giving rise to three dominant configurations: physical education-as-gymnastics, physical education-as-sport-techniques, and physical education-as-health-promotion. We engage with these analyses using Antonovsky’s theory of salutogenesis and its expression via a river of life metaphor, interpreting and discussing relations between each configuration: the river (as physical culture), the swimmer (as physical education student), the form of swimming (as physical education configuration), and the swimming teacher (as physical education teacher). We utilise this framing to signal a new, radical, future configuration for the subject, one that is in fact already underway, informed by a salutogenic orientation to health: physical education-as-creative-participation. We conclude the paper by outlining several innovations entailed by this new configuration, chiefly, pluralising and localising physical culture, emphasising the co-creative capacities of teachers and students, and foregrounding the importance of unit design as a narrative undertaking informed theoretically and philosophically as well as pedagogically.