Filed under: la nueva encantada
Have you ever heard anyone say that they’ve found what they’re looking for? I don’t think I’ve ever heard it vocalized. I’ve heard people say that they’re happy and I’ve heard proclamations like “This is the best thing for me, what I always needed, ” etc. etc., but I’ve not heard the former. I was just reading this blog post from a Microsoft employee (i’ve frequently read they’re encouraged to blog) about the book Stumbling Upon Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, and the blogger ends with this sentence: “As for me? I’m happy, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
Which led me to the obvious.
Do people do that? Do they find it? I’m dancing along the path, I promise, but I’m kind of suspect.
Did Ghandi? If so, did he do it with calorie restriction? Why would I ask that? Because I watched Gandhi the film for the first time last year (= LOTS of fasting) and I just read this. And I read that because I recently read this and this – my curiosity in the subject developed after learning the results of one of the studies funded by the research institution that currently employs me. The project is from one of our postdocs who works in this lab in Harvard’s Institute on Aging. Last year they published the big-news study linking resveratrol in red wine to longevity. During a JSC jaunt I organized for the postdocs last year, Philipp’s presentation on the results of his rat studies pretty much summed, “resveratrol helps, but the only proven method for longevity is calorie restriction.” At which point we all looked around the table at each other and tried to chew our conference-room-table cookies a leetle bit quieter. Yum. I’ll try it with the wine maybe.
My grandmother turned 98 on Monday. I sent her flowers, but a day late. I really love that lady; I’m awed by her life and her really soft eyes and the fact that I can always see in her face that she loves me titanically. Grandmothers can seriously be the best. She just spills it, her human-ness; it’s the greatest. I visited her on Easter, sat next to her, held her hand and told her about a gorgeous gothic revival I’ve been visiting a lot recently. I told her how much she’d love it, how much it reminded me of churches she’d visited in England. She really seemed to respond to it.
If someone related to me has lived without much complication to be almost 100 years old, naturally I’m interested in discovering how the hell. Especially when others related to me have gone and fallen apart at half the age. Many people I know, regardless of whether they practice much of what they learn, are very interested in keeping abreast of the news in nutrition and health – all of it. We don’t want to fall apart and be miserable. We want to keep our hearts lithe and the strength in our arms. There isn’t much patience for post-operative weakness; it depresses. It’s an interesting thing, being both witness and member.
