Blue Zones: Where Are You Going?
Why do you get up in the morning? If you’re a parent with small children, it’s obvious. If you work outside the home, easy to understand. But what happens when you decide to retire, or even retire early? If you want to live well to 100, what are you going to do for the next 30+ years? One of my questions to people who say they want to retire is “to do what”—be first in line for a supermarket’s free sample day?
Purpose
People who live well to 100 in Blue Zones have some sort of purpose. It’s more than just a positive attitude, although that appears to help. For some, it’s an opportunity to socialize: to meet someone for a walk and talk, or to get together with old friends to get coffee with their senior discount at the fast-food joint and tell stories.
For others, it’s volunteer activities, the desire to serve others: food banks, delivering meals, teaching, and so on.
Having faith in something greater than this world is important to many centenarians. That also provides purpose to many.
They still work. One gentleman gets up, gets on his horse, and moves cattle from one pasture to another.
The purpose can be as different as there are people, but everyone seems to have a good reason to get up in the morning.
Stress
One thing that they seem to learn is how to deal with stress. It may be playing games in a group, group exercise such as tai chi or yoga, or even preparing meals from scratch. Stress never goes away; it may be that with age comes the experience that stress is usually temporary, and often you’ve seen worse. Finding ways to deal with it is important.
The Bottom Line
Secrets of the Blue Zones doesn’t provide answers; it provides directions. Communities are laid out differently in modern countries than in most Blue Zone cities and towns. We want space; we value independence. But what price do we pay in our longevity by taking away access to friends, families, churches, and community centers? Having a purpose is not just a goal sheet with a to-do list; it’s the need to serve others in some meaningful way. More next Tuesday.
What are you prepared to do today?
