A note from a young gentleman
Nothing to Excess — Practice it all your life!
Because awareness arrives later than it should.
Saturday mornings
Just before I headed to Vietnam, I spent two years as a lab technician. From 1966 to 1968, between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, I made the rounds of several nursing homes every Saturday, drawing blood.
I was selective about whom I asked. Only the ones past ninety — and of those, only the ones who were healthy and level-headed. Clear-eyed, funny, entirely themselves. Those were the people who had actually done it. So I asked them:
What's the secret to longevity?
I asked it for two years. Smokers answered it. Drinkers answered it. People who by every rule should not have been sitting there at ninety-four answered it.
And the answer kept coming back the same.
The answer
- Be aware of how you are living. Not judgment — attention. Most people run on autopilot for decades and never check the dashboard.
- Otherwise, live in moderation — nothing to excess. Not abstinence. No restriction. Moderation, which is a harder discipline than either.
That is the whole of it. I have carried it ever since and never found reason to add to it.
What awareness actually means
Awareness is not a mood or a resolution. It is daily habits — small, repeatable, honest. The habit is what awareness looks like once it stops being an idea. Pick things you can do without deciding to do them:
- Attached to something you already do every day, so it never depends on willpower.
- Short enough that a bad day cannot derail it.
- Honest — you know when you have skipped it, and you do not pretend otherwise.
The rest is self-evident. Everyone already knows what "to excess" looks like in their own life.
The routine
These are mine. I have done most of them for decades, and I did not get them from the internet — they came from yoga training, from reading, from paying attention. Every one is old. Not one requires you to believe a statistic.
Daily — six for the morning
- Water first. A glass on waking, warm if you like. In India this is ushapan, and it goes back millennia. You have gone seven or eight hours without any.
- Light, early. Ten minutes outside, or at a bright window. This is the best understood item on the list — daylight is the main signal that sets your body clock, and the clock runs everything downstream of it.
- Move what stiffened overnight. Stretch, walk, whatever you will actually do. It does not need a name or a mat.
- Protein at breakfast. Muscle gets harder to keep as you age, and most people load all their protein into dinner. Spreading it out is the sensible correction.
- Ten seconds on each leg. Beside a chair, close enough to grab it. Lift one foot an inch off the floor, let go, count to ten, switch. Balance is trainable at any age and declines quietly if you never test it. Build up slowly — hands on the chair the first week, two fingers the second, one finger the third. Never in the middle of a room.
- Slow breathing. Four in, hold seven, out for eight — or any pattern that lands you near six breaths a minute. This is pranayama with a stopwatch. Slow breathing at that rate measurably shifts heart-rate variability and vagal tone; that research is real, and it keeps replicating.
Weekly — four to keep you honest
- One real effort. A long walk, a round of golf, something that leaves you breathing hard. Once a week is enough to know you still can.
- One look back. Sit down and ask where the week ran to excess. Food, drink, work, worry, television — everyone has a category. Naming it is the whole exercise.
- One real conversation. Voice, not text. A call counts. Sitting across from someone counts more.
- One day you do not schedule. Rest is a habit too, and it is the one people are proudest of skipping.
Monthly — four for the long view
- Write down a number. Weight, blood pressure, how far you walked without stopping. One number, same day each month. The trend tells you things no single reading can.
- Review what you take and why. Medications, supplements, the lot. Bring the list to your doctor. Things accumulate quietly.
- Call someone you have lost track of. A year of silence is not a decision anyone made. It just happens, and then one day it cannot be undone.
- Learn one thing badly. Something you are genuinely not good at. Being a beginner again is uncomfortable, which is exactly why it works.
You will notice no numbers attached to any of these. That is deliberate. The numbers are the part that goes stale, and the part people invent. The practices have outlasted every study written about them.
Now that I am halfway through my personal journey, more or less, this is some of what the first half taught me. So, please be aware!
Be aware of how you are living. Otherwise, nothing to excess.
It was good enough for people who had already made it. It is good enough for me.
Bill Seymour — the young gentleman in question, age 76
Passed along for whatever it is worth. Check anything health-related with your own doctor.
