Randi Kreiss

Do you want to live long or live wide?

Posted

Before you swallow that éclair, perhaps you want to consider the rest of your life.

It seems a fitting time, as 2016 turns toward 2017, to take a step back and think about not just the past year, but all the years ahead, however many they may be for each of us.

We are lucky enough to live in a time of advanced technology and medicine (note the new, 100 percent effective Ebola vaccine), and the melding of these two offers us choices about how we want to spend our days, how we want to eat, where we want to travel, with whom we want to associate and what we want to do about the world we will leave behind. These advances give us more control over our lives than our ancestors had, and with that control comes real choice.

For example, would you choose to smoke yourself silly, eat hot dogs, ice cream and Big Macs every day, skip the yearly checkup, chuck the hypertension pills and drive like a demon if it would cost you 10 years of your life?

Of course, we can make great, sensible, healthy choices and still die young. There is the falling brick, the plane crash, the crazed gunman. We can’t do anything about that.

But, barring early and unexpected intervention, we can expect a reasonably long life and make decisions that either extend or shorten our time on earth. You’d think that everyone would do everything possible to live long, but many people actually choose to live wide (not a pun), even though it means they’ll die younger. Just take a flight anywhere in the U.S. and see how many people can barely fit into their seats. Ditto your local food court.

It’s a complicated issue, because most of us don’t sit around contemplating our lives as a whole — we just live, day by day, doughnut by doughnut, and don’t think too much about how our behavior is affecting our expected life span.

So, I’m proposing that, as the year turns, we take some time to focus on the choices we make. More than that, I suggest we consciously decide if we would rather live long or wide (and hope we get to have a choice).

If we smoke, drink too much, do drugs, eat too much, drive too fast, work too hard, feel too stressed, we are choosing to live wide, to indulge our appetites, rather than preserve our health. And it’s a viable and free choice one may make. If we isolate ourselves, avoid medical care, don’t wear our seat belts and eat fast food, we’re making a choice.

If we choose to live long by eating kale and pomegranates, exercising, getting plenty of sleep and driving carefully, there’s also a caveat. Living long, in and of itself, is an empty goal. I know people who starve themselves, don’t travel and avoid relationships. Why live at all?

It would be good, I think, to do what we can to live long, to be responsible to ourselves and to the people who love us. But we also want to live wide enough to make our time here worthwhile. That means enjoying the journey, stopping for snacks, taking on some risk and bringing along people we love. More specifically, it means supporting the arts, medical research, environmental conservation, religious freedom and world peace, all now at risk under a new administration. We have work to do, friends. 

Quite amazing, isn’t it, how many of us live the unexamined life? We just charge ahead, consuming food and goods and even the earth around us as if it will all be there forever.

As the new year commences, I plan to make some midcourse commitments — specifically, to keep writing and advocating for the best of American values. On a personal level, I will treat this body I’m in with a little more respect, feed it better, exercise it more and keep its brain buzzing with new challenges.

With a little luck, and depending on the way of life we choose, we can have a good ride, a long ride, or a good long ride. We just have to take care of ourselves and this place we call Earth.

Copyright © 2017 Randi Kreiss. Randi can be reached at randik3@aol.com.