“I don’t know whether I would have made the choice to enter the treatment trial.” Listen to you! There’s that word again, always coming up. The idea of “choice” became a defining feature of our lives in the early years of the twenty-first century.
As medical knowledge—especially in the field of gerontology—moved forward in quantum leaps, we came to understand better the role that certain choices play in our destinies. To quit smoking, to enter a treatment program for addiction, to seek an optimal weight, to enroll in the clinical trial for a radical new anti-aging therapy…but I’m getting ahead of myself. These aren’t the choices I wanted to talk about.
It’s easy to see how these “macro” choices could have a profound impact on the flow of life. You take a 10-mile bike ride every day for a year, sure, you’re going to see changes, and you’re not surprised when the river of your life is diverted around the rock in midstream—that major coronary that would otherwise have stopped you in your tracks at 63.
But it’s a mistake to think of your life as a riverbed, or at any rate, to think of it as a river that flows fast and deep. What it takes to divert this stream is so much smaller and more subtle than a boulder. It’s that Big Mac you ate this morning. That infinitesimally small, seemingly unimportant choice started a wave that will ripple into tomorrow—and tomorrow and tomorrow, as the man said. With that choice under your belt (so to speak), the next one will be easier.
And likewise with the choices that, for want of a better word, I’ll call “good.” To go to bed at a decent time, to set the alarm for seven hours, to put the day’s troubles behind you so you can renew yourself with sleep. It’s such a small thing. But one good night begets another. A habit is born out of the gradual accumulation of choices. You add up a thousand or so good nights’ sleep—high-quality sleep, with plenty of REM—and our scientists tell us that you’ll find yourself 21 days younger at the end of three years than if you hadn’t diverted your stream with that particular choice.
It doesn’t sound like much. It’s not. But in those days our knowledge progressed in surges, and forests of choices sprang up around us. Take this supplement or that one? Join a spin class or study martial arts? Eat low-fat or high-protein? Magnets or hyperbarics? Experts and specialists and charlatans competed for their 15 minutes of fame and for our attention. A new career was born: the Personal Choice Agent. I couldn’t afford to hire one, so I went back to school to become one.
Note: The assignment today was to write about choices—many or few, little ones or big ones. This text is meant to follow closely upon Exercise #3, which is the source of the first line. This text probably makes more sense if you know that the narrator is about a thousand years old.
It wasn’t my intent, but this sounds to me like someone from the 31st century talking to someone in the 21st century. Your impressions?
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
OK, this one seems like two different stories that got mixed up together. Maybe I have talked to you too much so I hear content from our conversations on health and well being being mixed in with “Millenials” content. To me it reads like your thoughts on exercise and food and sleep and their impact on health, bookended between a first and last paragraph out of the “Millenials” story. I think the writing is excellent as always; I just think the two concepts have not blended well yet. Question is did you really write two stories at the same time that need separating (the effects of writing on too little sleep!), or do you need to add more to this one story to make the two parts blend better?
I wrote it all at once, for what that’s worth. And of course, you have to take into consideration that you get to hear me flap my gums all the time, so you read from the perspective of someone who knows a lot of the things that are on my mind at any given time.
Anyway…it’s a first draft. We’ll see whether it gets enough traction inside my head to get a second try.
On the other hand…I was also trying to begin to introduce some of the culture shifts and science that will go into the story of HOW people started living to be 1,000. Dig it?
I dig it man. And I really see many chapters on how people start living to be 1000, or at least many chapters with pieces of that puzzle dropped in.