HEALTHY AT 100 (39 page)

My father had achieved the American dream. But I was called forth by a different longing. Having enough money so that you can meet your basic needs is necessary and important, but there are other things that also matter a great deal. I wanted to see if I could be part of making the world a healthier place. I wanted my steps to be guided by a reverence for life.

Along with many Americans in the 1960s, I was part of the civil rights movement. I marched and worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and I loved and admired him immensely. When this apostle of peace and love was murdered, I felt as though a bullet had gone through my heart, too.

Along with Dr. King and many other Americans, I abhorred the violence and insanity of the war in Vietnam. Only a few months after Dr. King was killed, another man whom many of us viewed as a bringer of hope, Robert F. Kennedy, was also assassinated. These were very dark times, and I was filled with despair. In a world that seemed increasingly adrift in violence, cynicism, hopelessness, and fear, I wanted desperately to find a path to sanity and love. I wanted to be part of a fundamental global transformation, and although I didn’t know exactly how to go about a task so huge and idealistic, I did know that, for me, making and selling ice cream was not part of it.

I did not find it easy, however, to explain my thoughts and feelings to my father, a conservative businessman who was proud of the many things his great wealth enabled him to buy, and who never to my knowledge went a day without reading
The Wall Street Journal.
He had come of age during the Great Depression of the 1930s, while I was becoming an adult in the 1960s. Our lives were shaped by very different times.

“It’s a different world now than when you grew up,” I told him.
“The environment is deteriorating rapidly under the impact of human activities. Every two seconds a child somewhere dies of hunger while elsewhere there are abundant resources going to waste. The gap between the rich and the poor is increasing. We live now under a nuclear shadow, and at any moment the unspeakable could happen. Can you see that inventing a thirty-second flavor would not be an adequate response for my life?”

This was very difficult for my father. Having worked hard his whole life, he had attained an extraordinary level of financial success, and he very much wanted to share his achievements with his only son. He thought I was being hopelessly idealistic, and he warned me sternly that idealists end up poor and miserable. But I did not feel drawn to the life he wanted me to follow. Whether it was hopelessly idealistic or not, I wanted to be part of the effort to bring about a more compassionate and healthy world. I felt called to take a stand for a thriving, just, and sustainable way of life for all.

Under the circumstances, I decided that the most courageous and life-affirming thing to do was to walk away from the family business and to leave behind all connection to my family’s fortune. This felt like the most honest and liberating choice I could make. It was a choice for my integrity.

It was not a choice, however, that my father could then understand. Sadly, it was a source of distance in our relationship. He did not appreciate the path I was taking, and could not grasp why I would refuse the golden opportunity he was offering me.

I hated disappointing him, but I had to be true to myself. In 1969, my wife, Deo, and I moved to a remote part of a little island off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, where we built a one-room log cabin in which we lived for the next ten years. We grew most of our own food, and our gardens were totally organic. The money we needed came from the yoga and meditation classes I taught. We were financially poor, in many years spending less than a thousand dollars, but we didn’t need a lot. We were profoundly in love. Our time was our own. And we were learning a lot about growing food, about healing, and about ourselves.

In 1973, four years into our time on the island, our son, Ocean, was born, at home and into my hands. As he grew up we continued
to spend very little money, so that we could have time for each other and the other things that mattered to us. We understood what Thoreau meant by “I make myself rich by making my wants few.” We celebrated simplicity.

As Ocean grew up I naturally had expectations for him, but more important to me than whether he lived up to them was that he be able to listen to himself well enough to know when my expectations were in alignment with his destiny and when they were not. The last thing I wanted to do was to tyrannize him with my own fears and unfulfilled wishes. What mattered was not whether he disappointed me, but that he not betray his own soul.

Eventually we moved back to California, and several of my books about healing ourselves and healing our world became bestsellers, giving us some measure of financial security. The press took to calling me things like “the rebel without a cone” and “the prophet of nonprofit.”

Meanwhile, my father, on account of his diabetes and high blood pressure, was beginning to make major changes in his diet. Gradually he gave up eating ice cream or any other form of sugar, and he greatly decreased his intake of meat. As a result, his health improved dramatically. He liked reminding me that he was “not a card-carrying vegetarian,” but he was beginning to have far more respect for the lifestyle choices I had made and the work I was doing.

A year or so after my grandtwins were born, my parents, now in their mid-eighties, came to visit us and stayed for a few days. They saw our three-generation household living together in ways that they were not accustomed to. They watched as we all shared in the joys and challenges of caring for the babies, and saw how we sought to respond to the little ones’ special needs with patience and kindness.

The babies, who had been born extremely prematurely, had spent nearly the first two months of their lives in a hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, and they had come home from the hospital fragile and terrified of life. Babies born that early are often exceedingly touch-averse. We had been warned by doctors that they might never respond normally to human contact. Our response was to hold the little ones in continuous skin-to-skin contact with us virtually twenty-four hours a day, even allowing them to sleep on our bodies
at night. My parents—who were products of a time when beliefs prevailed like “Spare the rod and you’ll spoil the child” and “Don’t pick up babies or you’ll spoil them”—saw how we provided the babies with endless opportunities for physical connection. And they observed the results—the twins were growing into joyful, curious little guys who loved being cuddled.

I expected it to be difficult for my parents to see the very different way we were raising these little ones, and also for them to see how in our home the men as well as the women changed diapers, cleaned house, and made the meals. Perhaps because they were nearing the end of their lives, they seemed more accepting of our differences than I had experienced them before. I didn’t realize, though, how deep the acceptance went.

At one point, my father took me aside. “When you left Baskin-Robbins,” he reminisced, “I thought you were crazy.”

“Yes,” I replied. “I remember.”

“Well,” he said, speaking more slowly now and turning to face me, “I see that time has proved you were right to follow your own star.”

Hearing him speak this way, I felt for the first time his blessing on my life. And when the time came for them to leave, my mother, too, said something I had never before heard her say. “You may not be rich in material things,” she told us, “but it’s obvious that you are rich in love.” She took a deep breath. “And in the long run, that is actually more important.”

Although the possibility that love is what matters most in a human life and is the source of our greatest healing may seem out of step with the modern drive to become rich and famous, it is really quite an ancient understanding. The columnist Rochelle Pennington retells an old story:

The wives who lived within the walls of the Weinsberg Castle in Germany were well aware of the riches it held: gold, silver, jewels, and wealth beyond belief.

Then the day came in 1141
A.D.
when all their treasure was threatened. An enemy army had surrounded the castle and demanded the fortress, the fortune, and the lives of the men within. There was nothing to do but surrender.

Although the conquering commander had set a condition for the safe release of all women and children, the wives of Weinsberg refused to leave without having one of their conditions met, as well. They demanded that they be allowed to fill their arms with as many possessions as they could carry out with them. Knowing that the women couldn’t possibly make a dent in the massive fortune, their request was honored.

When the castle gates opened, the army outside was brought to tears. Each woman carried out her husband.
²⁰

Of all the world’s cultures, those that have endured the longest are those that have placed the highest value on human relationships, like the African Pygmies. The late Jean-Pierre Hallet, an internationally renowned ethnologist and the world’s leading authority on the African Pygmies, described how easily and openly the Efé Pygmies of central Africa express their caring for one another, and the great amount of touching and affection he continually saw expressed among all the Pygmies.
²¹
Babies and small children are continuously held and carried. Older children and adults often touch one another. He was struck by how much the Pygmies cuddle, how frequently they hold hands or sit with an arm around a friend or place their head in another’s lap.

A central understanding in the Pygmy world is that we are made for companionship and relationship. If food is scarce, the first to be fed are the children and the elders—those who are most vulnerable. After studying their religion in considerable depth, Hallet concluded that “the whole substance and meaning of the Pygmy religion is ‘Be good to other people. Respect, protect and preserve.’ ”

Every anthropologist or ethnologist who has lived within Pygmy society has been deeply moved by their gentleness and family devotion.
In Pygmy society, all children are cherished, and boys and girls are valued equally. There is no equivalent of the orphanage, since any orphaned child is immediately embraced and adopted by relatives or friendly neighbors.

Pygmy women traditionally enjoy complete freedom and equality. There is no crime, there are no police, and no one is ever punished. Every person is accustomed to being treated with respect and caring, with the result that people of all ages experience a remarkable degree of security and comfort within themselves. There is a striking absence of greed, aggression, or envy.

Their language has no word for “hatred” and no word for “war.” But just as Eskimo languages have many words for different kinds of snow, the Pygmies have a considerable number of words that describe different kinds of affection and caring.

You can learn a lot about a people by discovering what they view as the greatest sins. With the Pygmies, the worst violation of their laws and commandments is to be cruel to children or old people.
²²

Author and physician Bernie Siegel is so impressed by the mental health of the Pygmies that he writes, “If we would love one generation of the world’s children as the Pygmies love theirs, the planet would change and our problems disappear.”
²³

Researchers who have studied the Pygmies speak not only of their emotional and spiritual health but also of their vigor and heightened sensory acuity. According to Hallet, “these healthy, delightfully happy and highly expressive people…have the keenest vision of any living humans.”

The pygmies are not merely a life-affirming society. DNA and genetic studies have confirmed that they are the most ancient ancestral form of Homo sapiens. One anthropologist concluded that they are “older than the sphinx, older than the pyramids, older than the texts written on papyrus, camel bones, bronze, brick or stone.”
²⁴
He and many other scientists hold that the Pygmies merit the title of the earliest civilized people known to history.

Their connectedness to one another and their respect for the natural living world have sustained the Pygmies for an estimated fifty thousand years. This is a hundred times the length of time that has
passed since Columbus. Sadly, though, in the last century the forest home of the Pygmies has been decimated by outside forces, and these kindhearted people have suffered greatly. It is a source of deep sorrow to me that they are today on the edge of extinction.

The Pygmies are not the only ancient society whose way of life can tell us something profound about the qualities that have been essential for a culture to thrive for tens of thousands of years. The Bushmen—also known as the San people of southern Africa—are another of the world’s very oldest societies, and may even be as ancient as the Pygmies. Most anthropologists are in agreement that the Bushmen have existed as a culture for at least forty thousand years, and maybe much longer.

In the 1980s, the widely viewed film
The Gods Must Be Crazy
exposed many in the modern Western world to the extraordinary sweetness, gentleness, and innocence of these people. The star of the film was a Bushman named N!xau, who prior to the making of the film had been only minimally exposed to the wider world. He had seen only three white people in his life, and he had never seen a settlement larger than the village huts of his San people. Knowing nothing about money, he let his first wages, $300 in cash, simply blow away in the wind. Many millions of people saw the film, and virtually all were captivated by his profound human warmth, radiant joy-fulness, and inner peace.

We can learn a great deal from the Bushmen, as we can from the Pygmies, not only about their culture but also about human nature and who we are as human beings.
²⁵
They have always lived with dignity and been committed to each other’s health and happiness. They have been for many tens of thousands of years a thoroughly cooperative people and have lived together in almost complete harmony. They have lived in a desert so barren it is almost inconceivable that humans can survive there, but they have never responded to the scarcity and hardship of their environment by hoarding or violence. They have responded instead by sharing whatever they have. They
live by the belief that an individual’s well-being is inextricably interwoven with that of the group to which he or she belongs.