As I sat down to write today, this quote kept coming to mind. Whenever my mind keeps returning to something I always assume it’s important so I followed my intuition. Of course, I assumed I’d reflect about how much longer we live in the modern age than our ancestors did, but I thought that I’d better do a little digging to see if that was actually true.
I found these posts (here & here) that suggest that we don’t actually live longer than the ancient ones or even our great grandparents – ‘scientists have compared the life span[sic] of adults in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes (excluding the infant mortality rate). It was found that once infant mortality rates were removed, life span[sic] was calculated to between 70 and 80 years, the same rate as that found in contemporary industrialised societies. The difference is that, in the latter, most individuals survive childhood.’
Of course, popular belief still holds that we DO in fact live longer (and you can easily find many sources to support that).
But then I thought – does it really matter if we live longer or not? Each one of us will live for exactly as long as we live and we don’t really have any control over the number of our days. What we can control is whether we take care of our bodies well enough that they are still working properly as we near our end. Every single one of us already knows that we should get plenty of sleep, move our bodies, learn to manage stress, and eat well – and we probably all have a pretty good idea what it means to do each of those things. The question is – are you taking care of your body? Or will you feel like ole Eubie (above) as you near your hundredth birthday? Don’t wait until it’s too late – start taking care of yourself today.