You don't know what you know until you know it

For me, my epiphany was flying back from Maui yesterday when I realized I was about 2 to 5 times stronger than when I left for Kauai a couple of weeks ago. It wasn't until the temperatures started dropping in the plane at altitude that I realized this. Partly, it's just it has been so hot and humid in Kauai and Maui that it has been hard for me to do much deep thinking about life and staying alive. While I was there I was still sort of scared that this might be my last year on earth.

Now, I'm seeing that if I'm very disciplined about medicine and exercise and diet I might still be around in my 90s or 100s if I wish. For me, it's all about quality of life. Without enough quality of life I really doubt if I'll stick around very long here on earth. I think most guys are like this. Women seem to come from a very different place than this. I think men were bred to be soldiers for thousands of years. If they weren't taught to fight and die in a moment's notice tribes and nations just didn't survive at all. So, genetically men (the ones that survived to breed) had to mostly be fighters dying for the greater good of the tribe, nation and family. So, genetically that is what men are: Fighters and those who die defending their families, tribes and nations.

So, when it actually comes to dying it is more easy for us to accept death simply because we were trained to die in battle from birth anyway. At least this is true of men born in the 1950s and 1940s like myself. For example, more boys my age exactly died in Viet Nam than any other age born in 1948 like me. And since 50,000 boys died there and hundreds of thousands after they returned home eventually, a good percentage of the 50,000 that died there in Viet Nam in the war were exactly my age born in 1948.

So, staying alive is completely about quality of life and the fact that I would like to not abandon my wife and children and friends if I still have all my mental and physical capacities intact.

So, 71 from this point of view might as well be 41 in this context in other nations around the world. Simply because, from my observations how healthy I am presently at 71 is pretty much how healthy the average man was at 41 in the 1950s here in the U.S.  In other words they tended to die a lot between 35 and 50 or 60 in the 1950s when I was growing up. Most men had lost most of their teeth and either wore false teeth plates or had bridges installed between teeth by age 40. Whereas I'm 71 with no bridges at all and only one tooth implant but about nine root canals and caps on all my front teeth which look nice at this age.

So, I'm actually both physically and mentally younger than most 41 year olds that I knew in the 1950s here at 71 in 2019.

So, I'm Grateful to God for all the Grace in my life that brought me here to today and beyond.