What I was taught growing up allowed me to survive all the way to 72 now

I am very grateful to have had the parents that I did who didn't smoke or drink. This was helpful because of all the children I knew growing up who had this problem, mostly on the drinking side with their parents and also losing parents eventually to lung cancer and the like. This even happened to my present wife's mother from smoking by the way. She only lived 74 and I almost lost my wife when she lost her mother. Luckily, I had already lost my father so I was able to help her through this. When my father passed away I wasn't right from about 37 when he passed to about 50 when I got a heart virus and almost died myself. Only by almost dying myself was I able to get over my father's passing finally and to put things in perspective. Then my wife's mother passed away a month before I fully recovered from my heart virus and I had to deal with my wife's grief too. But, somehow we made it through all this with our 2 1/2 year old daughter and my other daughter was 7 years older then in Spring of 1999 when her mother passed on.

Having two parents always from birth throughout my life until age 37 was a very strengthening thing for me I see now when I look back. Many people look strong from the outside but they are not. So, it has always been very surprising for me to lose so many STRONG looking people who broke and died one by one along the way during my life. Only to realize that I really was the strong one unbeknownst to me at the time.

But, this is only something you learn over a long time as everyone passes on around you and you keep surviving somehow everything you go through.

It is as if I have lived 100 or more different lifetimes now at 72 years of age.

Each decade was completely different than any others and this you should be aware of that you will live through many different eras and styles of thinking during your life and learning to be very adaptable might be the most important thing you will ever learn in living a really long time.

I would say the most important thing to learn is to love to learn new things if you want to live a long time. because you have to be constantly taking in new information to survive whatever comes along the way. You might have to live anywhere on earth to survive whatever comes. You just never know what will happen in your life.

So, I'm very surprised in most ways to still be alive and I think most of all I'm surprised at how happy I am in my life most of all.

In the 1950s I expected to die in a nuclear blast or a war somewhere like in Viet Nam or something. But, by the Grace of God I never got drafted and so that didn't happen to me. Thank God!

So, at every point God has blessed me. It isn't that I didn't have many problems like most people do, it's that I always was given solutions and opportunities by God to figure all these things out and keep moving forward always.

The hardest times for me to survive were likely 10 to 15 with blunt Trauma childhood epilepsy and 21 to 25 after having to leave my childhood church from asking too many questions.

Churches cannot survive people who are asking philosophical questions because that is what scientists do and churches cannot survive these kinds of questions because most are based upon sort of fairy tales that you just have to accept on faith and belief and are not scientific at all.

So, if you seriously question any religion you are going to have problems with that religion for not just being a naive child and believing blindly whatever they tell you.

But, my parents even though they raised me in a religion didn't smoke or drink and created in me the foundations of culture and politeness and also I learned because they were ministers to be able to talk to anyone, rich or poor or middle class anywhere on earth in any culture. Because we had to greet people after church services always and so I had to learn to talk to and to try to help any one I met growing up from age 6 to 12 when my parents were in charge of a Mystical Christian Church in Los Angeles from 1954 to 1960.

So, all these things allowed me to even communicate with rich people okay too which I have found incredibly helpful in being a businessman all during my life including now.

So, Thank you God, for preparing me so well for this life here on earth!