John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe, the second, third, and fourth American presidents, all died on the fourth of July. Actress Debbie Reynolds died the day after her daughter, actress Carrie Fisher, died in 2016. Johnny Cash died of a broken heart just a few months after his wife June Carter Cash passed in 2003. Same story with George H.W. Bush dying soon after Barbara Bush.
A 2019 meta-analysis of 15 studies involving 229,391 participants conducted by Alan Rozanski, a cardiologist at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital in New York, also shows the profound influence of mindset on longevity. It indicated a strong relationship between optimism and decreased risk of cardiovascular events like heart attacks and a lower mortality rate.
Viktor Frankl, who wrote about what he experienced and witnessed in a Nazi concentration camp in “Man’s Search for Meaning,” suggests that meaning is the fuel of life and can create hope and optimism even in the worst of circumstances,
“The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? No, thank you,’ he will think. ‘Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.”
How are you investing in your will to live?
-Chip