July 29 2023
Want to live long? Want to live forever?
The first question is easily answered: Follow the rules listed below.
- Eat well.
- Avoid cigarettes.
- Get a good night’s sleep.
- Be physically active.
- Manage stress.
- Avoid binge drinking.
- Be free from opioid addiction.
- Have positive social relationships.
However, to eat well is not easy, because BB-Big Business- conspires to prevent that. Roughly 60 percent of the calories in the average US diet comes from highly processed foods. Eating products such as most breakfast cereals, snack bars, frozen meals and virtually all packaged sweets, (even chocolate? Pecca Fortiter: Sin bravely!), is linked to negative health outcomes, exacerbating diabetes and obesity, and, yes, causing cancer.
Not only that: They may have a significant impact on our minds: making us dumber. So, the question, ‘how do we eat well?’ is complicated for most, but easy for me.
Why for me?
So far in the year, I still eat last year’s homegrown potatoes; I still enjoy each week my garden-grown beans and beets and cabbages, preserved in my freezer. I already enjoy fresh lettuce every day. Next week my first tomatoes!
Sure: it’s a bit of work, but it’s outdoors. Sure, weeding is a chore, but it’s exercise. Want to live not only long, but also healthy? Grow your own, which I also did – no, not potatoes – when I lived in the city. And now: grow vertical in your living room!
Avoid tobacco.
I did. In 1961 I had an insurance agency. One of my clients was dying from lung cancer: his only appetite was for tobacco: no food, no drink. I, then and there, quit my ‘pack-a-day’ cigarette addiction and started running, 10k each day.
We are …..
We are what we eat. We are what we read. We are what we think. We are who we marry. We are our parents and grandparents. We are our genes. We become what we are through our total experiences. The goal in our lives ought to be that, when we die, we have become who we are. That means that we must constantly struggle to know ourselves.
Retirement is an excellent time for self-examination. Before that we are often lived through the circumstances enforced upon us: money and employment play a deciding factor: what we start out to do may not be what we really want to do or are fit to do.
Take me.
I came to Canada from the Netherlands in 1951, in my 23d year, never having worked a day in my life: 16 years of schooling and almost 2 years of compulsory military training.
Then emigrating to Canada was all the rage. The Dutch economy was at a crossroads, as suddenly the automobile/mechanical age had basically altered rural life, eliminating the small-time grocer, butcher, baker, farmer, and, as Geert Mak wrote, “How God disappeared from the Village”, drastically altered employment and life that had endured for generations.
Having no practical skills of any kind, I was swept up by the craze to try my luck abroad: I started with insurance, added real estate, and, after relocating, became a commercial Real Estate Appraiser. Curiously now, 65-70 years later, comfortably situated, in my dreams I worry how I would ever make enough to support a family.
We now live in the final stretch of history. A poem comes to mind:
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yes, believe me: the Second Coming is a fact, a fact of “faith, which is sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” Life stands and falls with faith. Signs of endings abound. I see them where others do not: scores of whales commit suicide. Why? Because their living spaces, their feeding grounds are poisoned. Animals know. Ever wondered what happens to the fauna, the deer, the birds making their habitat in the forests, now increasingly in flames? Or the small fry swimming in waters that are like hot tubs? They know.
All these creatures too, long for The Second Coming! The book of Jonah ends with God expressing concern for the animals living in Nineveh. Then cities were basically self-sufficient: now they are deathtraps, utterly dependent on supply, often thousands of miles away, causing Climate Change, now unstoppable.
Want to live forever?
Want to live forever, in a perfect world, where our good deeds will follow us? (Revelation 14: 13). Believe in The Second Coming. Believe in Christ’s return who will make this world we live in, perfect.