Heroes Not Zombies

Yesterday I posted about Seth Godin’s comments about making money.

Today I read an article by Desmond Morris about living to a grand old age. Remember Desmond Morris? He’s the zoologist who wrote “Manwatching“, a book I read as a teenager and found utterly fascinating. Well, he’s 80 years old now and he was writing about ageing. He tells us about Madame Jeanne Calment who lived in Arles until she died aged 122 (at 121 she was the world’s longest living human being). He wondered about her longevity. I’m sure you’ve read articles like that before, where people are interviewed to try and figure out what they were doing that contributed to their experience of health and longevity. Well, the amazing Madame Calment was still cycling and gardening at 121, and had tried to give up cigarettes at the behest of a local doctor a few years before but didn’t manage, and she enjoyed daily cheap, red wine, ate well of a typical French diet including rich stews, fois gras, and chocolates. She joked that her name, Calment, was very appropriate because she was always calm. And this, Morris thinks, was a key characteristic –

Had she worried about her health and taken steps to improve it, the anxiety caused by stirring up fears about ill-health would themselves have reduced the efficiency of her immune system.

Worrying about your health can make you sick! He mentions other long living people who shared this characteristic of not worrying about their health –

The oldest man who ever lived, Mr Izumi of Japan (who made it to 120), enjoyed his daily saki (rice wine) and said his secret was “not worrying”. Eubie Blake, a U.S. jazz pianist, said at his 100th birthday party: “If I’d known I was gonna live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” The irony is that it was probably his not worrying about his health that enabled him to live that long.

Regular, gentle exercise, like walking, cycling and gardening are common features of the lives of those who are over 100 years old and Desmond Morris makes an extremely interesting point about the place of exercise in these peoples’ lives. He noted that, when it came to exercise –

Cycling, walking and gardening were three of the most popular – done not to keep fit but for pleasure.

What’s Morris’s conclusion?

It seems that if you wish to live an unusually long life, you need to eat and drink what you fancy, keep as mobile as possible, have a lively interest in the world around you, avoid introspection and, above all, do not waste time worrying about your health.

I like his summary on the place of food in our lives too –

1. There are three truths concerning human feeding behaviour.
2. The first recognises that we evolved as omnivores, succeeding where others failed because we consumed a wide range of foods. One of the reasons we are now living longer than we did in the past is that the shelves of supermarkets display a truly astonishing variety of food from all over the world.
3. The second truth, which renders all diet books superfluous, is that the more you eat, the fatter you get, and the less you eat, the thinner you get. End of story. But whether you are eating more in order to put on weight or eating less in order to lose it, it is always important to keep the range of foodstuffs as wide as possible.
4. The final food truth is that you should enjoy what you eat and take time to relax while eating it. Speed and anxiety ruin digestion.