In the last episode, I talked about learning from my own experience and studies and living my life accordingly. Okay, maybe I didn’t mention the studying part. But one of the things I have done is to learn from Dan Buettner’s series of books about what he calls “blue zones”. These are places where people live significantly longer than average at a very high rate. He dug into the lifestyles that make up the local societies in these geographical areas, proposing them as tenets of a philosophy of longevity that anyone can follow.

I’ve also seen some of these behaviors show up in my annual review of the longest-lived people. One of the big ones is stress. I have yet to see an air traffic controller on that list of supercentenarians.

Now things that show up repeatedly in media, discussion, actions, etc. are called tropes and memes. One theory says that old wives’ tales, old sayings, are old simply because they are true, or vice versa. One example is “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” But this is also said of rumors, like “swallowed gum stays in your stomach for years.” So, I am careful about taking health advice just because many people are saying it. I also try to put some common and maybe some uncommon sense into those decisions.

Someone else’s experience might not be a good input for these choices. We’ve seen a lot of the supercentenarian ladies who eat a lot of sweets. It seems counter-intuitive, though there may be something to it. I haven’t adopted it as a desired behavior for myself.

Living a balanced life makes sense to me, but I have always had trouble putting it into practice, and big update: I’m still having trouble with that. The things I worry about, the things I think about, the things I want to do. All of these compete in my mind for total dominance. But as one wise text says, we seek “progress rather than perfection”.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay:
https://pixabay.com/users/stocksnap-894430/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=2557544

References:
https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/medical-urban-legends-fact-or-fiction-html
Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 5