In undressing this topic, it’s hard for a person to be utterly frank with you. Especially me, since I’m named Paul.
So, let me begin by offering you a bill. That would be Bill Saroyan, a fabled Bard of Fresno, Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award winning author of “The Human Comedy” and a famed crank, as well as the owner of a mighty, cookie-dusting mustache.
“I realize everyone has to die,” William Saroyan opined. “However, I always believed an exception would be made in my case.”
In nursing such a sentiment, the man is far from alone. And, ironically, he happened to express this feeling a mere five days before the sweet chariot swung low to whisk him to The Great Beyond, leaving his mortal coil—as well as that epic mustache—shuffled off.
The proximate cause of Saroyan’s abrupt exit at age 72 was prostate cancer gone wild, but the fact that he reputedly smoked like a chimney while drinking like a fish for quite a time likely exerted no small effect on the giddy acceleration of his chariot ride, as well as his premier boarding hour.
While Willie Saroyan did express a yen to experience a long, even an endless life, he also clearly revealed some of the stuff you might try in order to not get one.
ON THE PATH LONG TRAVELED
Naturally, every possible road shall bring you, sooner or later, to that grand off-ramp marked FINAL EXIT. Depending on your circumstances, most of us will opt for “much later.” The big trick is to extend the duration of travel whilst also enjoying your journey. Or—as it’s put sometimes—to die young as late as possible. How does one accomplish such a feat?
The number one technique, of course, is to avoid quite a few of all the things that could kill you. If one happens to live in a war zone, or a region struck by famine, drought, flood, tornado, earthquake, poverty or plague, this might prove difficult. But if you’re fortunate enough to live in peaceful spot and enjoy a degree of prosperity (such as, you feel reasonably confident of obtaining your next meal) you can still stumble into the pitfalls of harmful vice.
Now, I don’t claim that one can or ought to eliminate vice from life entirely. Moderation in all things, including moderation! Dabbling in a deleterious habit or two tends to keep you humble, which prevents overreach in many other areas. And striving to maintain a puritanical self-righteousness might create another sort of hardship.
Not only does an arid, anhedonic lifestyle impair your development, it easily fails to produce the desired effect. In other words, you might indeed collect a stack of years, but how happy or pleasant shall they all be? Pompous priggery is a recipe for social isolation and emotional frigidity. Somewhere along the line, you must learn to dance like Zorba.
But if an occasional indulgence in vice slides into compulsion, that’s when other danger signals ought to flash. If you sample the powders, fumes, fungi, fluids or any of the other stimulants available, keep this well in mind: only the dilettantes can remain the experts. Because after you drink from a bottle long enough, the bottle starts to slurp on you, and once you disappear within it, brother, you are done.
Plus, when you purchase much of the wherewithal of vice, you nurture the incomes of some of the biggest, meanest, nastiest, butthead gangs on this planet. And who truly yearns to live in a world that such miscreants come to dominate? Ask this question of the suppressed citizens of Cartel-Landia.
SKIN SO SOFT
To consider our maintenance of health in the face of the onrush of time and other threats, let’s work from the outside in—and thus begin with skin. It’s commonly stated that the 15-20 square feet of hide on a human bod is our largest organ. Well, that organ part is correct. Our dermis is a web of seven complex layers, with a load of functions to perform, directed by a majority of our DNA.
Skin evolved from the embryonic ectoderm, the same stem cell region our brains derive from. In every sense, then, our skins have become the outer surfaces of our brains. Want to see how your brain is doing, these days? Study your skin.
However, in terms of size, the skin arrives only in second place. Much larger is the inner surface of our convoluted small intestine. (Which we’ll cover when we get to digestion.)
As we age, our skin condition provides a graphic display of many aspects of our health in general. First, it loses thickness and resilience or elasticity. Secondly, it retains and reveals traumas of all sorts, from assorted bonks and nutritional deficiencies to the impacts of solar radiation and exposure to chemicals, irritants and disease factors.
In substance, it’s smarter to prevent such damage than seek to bounce back from it. Botox and collagen injections are feeble remedies that address mere symptoms. Far better is to limit exposure to that nuclear fusion furnace we call the Sun, add to your padding by wearing protective clothing when skin can be bashed or abraded, eat well and drink a bunch (of water).
And finally, don’t lust for perfection. Adopt some reasonable measures and then accept your results—with humor, whenever possible. For example, when I note the relentless shriveling of my own hide, I smile and tell myself that I am developing dragon’s skin. What comes next? My ability to breath flame? Well, that may depend on how much garlic I consume. An unrelenting urge to acquire a cavern-bursting heap of gems and gold? Well, I’d best get goin’ then… since my horde now mainly consists of a few spare buttons. And I’d like to last long enough to plop more thick manuscripts of novels on that pile! Maybe a poem or two.
MOVEMENT IS INTELLIGENCE
In an earlier newsletter, I promoted a notion that guiding ourselves in motion was the first big job of animated intelligence. Rather than drift about to bump into things, then discovering via the results of that contact whether the object might be friend or foe, unicellular bacteria developed means of locomotion—such as a flailing flagellum or hairlike whip on their rear ends—that could send them away from threats or toward nutrients.
While our means of propulsion have improved vastly since then, that mission has shifted in its basic aims not one whit. And your key takeaway from this datum should be: to keep your system highly functional, use it for the purpose for which it was originally designed: Move! Walk to places. Go exploring, with map and compass or without. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Learn a new dance, hobby, sport or trade.
Combine stout and continuous physical action with mental challenge, and you’ve got a winning recipe.
Movement does not just stimulate our nerves, it “swaps the juices around,” as Huck Finn so memorably put it. (“In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.”) For everything to flow, our bodies must go and go. There are so many currents and passageways in the corpus, cradling lymph, blood, molecules used in breathing and digestion, and noetic messages that constantly hurtle back and forth in our neurons.
I’m not saying that lots of movement will stop aging. In fact, too much unrelenting motion of the same sort can tear us down and speed it up! But a happy medium keeps our inner juices swapping to and through organs such as the kidneys, heart and lungs, bringing in fuel and taking out waste and keeping the whole contraption functioning as it’s meant to.
When we move, we can rid ourselves of pockets of stagnation and deprivation. Left alone these can swell, expand and take over, with entirely predictable results. Strive to be a tumbling river, not a still and clotted pond.
THE TOOLS OF THE TIRADE
Decline of muscle mass and bone density are the Achilles Heels of the elderly. Lose these, or let them seep away from you too early, and you set yourself up for injuries that will further curtail your motion. Which you DO want to retain! (See above.)
To keep healthy amounts of muscle and bone, perform weight-bearing exercises. These can range from swinging dumbells (the metal ones) around in a gym to walking home from the store with bags of groceries in your hands. Carry weighty stuff in a backpack whether you need to or not. Volunteer to help your friends move. Do your own gardening and landscape maintenance. That sort of thing.
You also need aerobic capacity. So, move faster. Jog if you can, or walk quickly if you can’t. Dance. Bike. Ski. Row. Anything that makes you breath hard for half-an-hour or more at a stretch. Try something like that at least once per day.
I love to do all of the above, depending on ambient weather or local opportunities. A particular favorite is swimming, and I prefer doing it for at least a half-mile or better, using an array of strokes, both on the surface and under water. A particular beauty of the activity is that it’s wonderfully aerobic at the same time that it’s extremely low-impact.
And swimming does help all of those juices to thoroughly circulate within your body, producing an endorphin reward, a glowing sense of well-being. I remember back when I joined The Dolphin Club—an open-water swim venue on San Francisco Bay—a venerable club shellback told me, “We hear more than enough about the runner’s high. Well, I think the swimmer’s high is superior, one of the best kinds of athletic feeling that exists.”
To which I’d reply, then and now, “Bingo.’
DIGESTION—IT TAKES A VILLAGE
A human being could be described as a rather fancy wrapper that embraces a thirty foot-long earthworm. That worm, of course, is our inner gastrointestinal (GI) tract. It is distinguished by a horizontal slot with teeth on one end that can smile to suggest approval, and a vertical slot on the other end with an exit portal and airlock—both of which eventually shall display only intermittent efficiency.
To put it bluntly, as you age, you’re forced to become more wary of leaks than Nixon’s White House ever was.
Here, the best measure to take to reduce the number and force of unscheduled emissions is to cultivate a friendly relationship with up to 100 trillion symbiotic microbes in your gut. That’s three times the number of cells with human DNA that make up the rest of you, so “symbiotic” is precisely the right term to describe them. You very much depend on each other. In short, when one’s inner earthworm is miserable, it’s very hard for the rest of you to feel at all well.
Clearly, the heedless guzzlings of youth—meat-lover’s pizza accompanied by too much cheap beer, say—cannot continue without dire results. That particular and peculiar party’s over, my friend.
Instead, first off, you need to be extremely wary of ingesting any interlopers. Nothing inspires the butt end of your earthworm to begin playing “Stormy Weather” quite like importing someone else’s E. coli. Not to mention the array of other calamitous microbes and parasites. Wash your hands early and often. Shun raw foods in unclean places.
Secondly, grow a lot more conscious of what you DO intend to eat. Those Paleo-Diet folk tend to be a bit over the top, but they’re still basically right, that we humans evolved to do our very best on fresh, high-fiber foodstuffs. Not over-processed crap designed by pernicious corporate gnomes to fool our brains and fatten our hips while padding their profits. I would augment the Paleo menu a bit, and say, also hit those whole grains, fresh greens and fruits, nuts, eggs, and organic dairy (if you can handle it).
Meat? Sure, should the stuff be your cup of tea. But as one ages, you need to and ought to consume far less of it. As an old Smothers Brothers routine went, “People say red meat is bad for you. Nah. Blue-green meat, now that’s what’s bad…”
Red meat is replete with minerals, especially iron. However, after age 60, a little of it goes a l-o-n-g way. Ditto for chicken or pork. If you lust for larger amounts of excellent protein, I’d recommend wild, cold-water fish like salmon, halibut or cod. Not only do you win a dose of their nifty, neuron-bolstering Omega oils, by buying and consuming such fillets, you nurture and support the local industries and healthy marine environments we must have to produce them.
And finally, consider sending out for additional help. My own DIS (Digestion Immigration Service) invites participation from the benign microbes in low-fat kefir, organic sauerkraut, and a few other probiotic sources.
PUT THE FUN BACK IN FUNERAL
Despite all your best efforts, you might notice that your expiration date nevertheless has begun to draw near. Don’t let this worry you or stress you out. Every human being prior to you—by which I mean, huge scads of ‘em—has gone through precisely the same process. Tough it out, and you’ll be in fine company.
One bon mot Harper Lee assigns to Atticus Finch in “To Kill A Mockingbird” (and a reason why it’s a masterpiece) is the lawyer’s definition of courage: “It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyways and see it through, no matter what.”
Take heart in your ability to confront inevitability. Even Jesus didn’t escape. He grew older one day at a time, too. Of course, He never got to experience the dubious delights of advanced age, since He split our scene at age 33. That makes it possible for us to depict Him as changeless, in the very prime of life, throughout all eternity. (Even if in subsequent centuries He did seem develop blond hair and blue eyes… But I suppose we should just regard that as one of His posthumorous miracles.)
When all’s been done and said, and we’ve fought for our lives to the best of our ability, it’s time to refute Dylan Thomas and go gentle into that good night. When your feet are on the threshold, don’t attempt to drag your heels. Pack your dopp kit and take the leap.
That’s my best advice. With the bark off, naturally.
Let’s finish with one more quote from Mr. Saroyan. “I’m falling apart! And it’s ver-r-ry interesting.”
