In my personal experience, the key to good health is a successful combination of very tiny improvements to DAILY HABITS: mental habits, eating habits, exercise habits, and spiritual habits.
So I was particularly interested by this FASCINATING story from the New York Times about Ikaria, an island in the Aegean Sea, that has the world’s highest concentration of long-lived people.
It contains an engaging story about a native Ikarian who lived in the US and returned to his homeland after being diagnosed with lung cancer. But only a New York Times writer can tell that story as it needs to be told, so I’ll let you read it yourself.
Here are just a couple of quick quotes from the piece:
Over the span of the next three days, I met some of Leriadis’s patients. In the area known as Raches, I met 20 people over 90 and one who claimed to be 104. I spoke to a 95-year-old man who still played the violin and a 98-year-old woman who ran a small hotel and played poker for money on the weekend.
So, how do the natives themselves explain their unusual longevity?
Ask the very old on Ikaria how they managed to live past 90, and they’ll usually talk about the clean air and the wine. Or, as one 101-year-old woman put it to me with a shrug, “We just forget to die.”
In Samos, they care about money. Here, we don’t. For the many religious and cultural holidays, people pool their money and buy food and wine. If there is money left over, they give it to the poor. It’s not a ‘me’ place. It’s an ‘us’ place.”
You really owe it to yourself to set aside a relaxed ten minutes to read this great story:
The Island Where People Forget to Die by Dan Buettner.