This country boasts a high number of centenarians and hardly a week passes without yet another citizen celebrating the ripe old age of one hundred years.
Even the most casual glance at the obituary pages will show that many others who do not reach the milestone, leave us in their late 80s and 90s.
There must be some lessons to be drawn from the experiences of these ordinary citizens, who were exposed to some of the most depressing of living conditions and financial and social hardships in their more formative years.
This has to be so because any current centenarian would have been born shortly after the dawn of the last century, and into the wake and aftermath of “legal” slavery, abolished by that time only to be replaced by a functional framework of social deprivation of the worst kind.
And yet their bodies and minds, exposed and buffeted by such ill consequences, speak volumes for the capacity of the human spirit to conquer whenever the slightest hope peers above the darkness which surrounds.
Most of these wonderful people persistently speak to three factors in their accounts of longevity.
A belief in the power and protection of the Almighty; hard work involving more often than not physical movement, and perhaps most important of all, the ingestion of a diet rooted in ground provisions.
The modern citizen may wish to ponder on these things. The belief in the Almighty fuels a certain self-assurance and inner confidence which may spawn many beneficial side effects; for that “blessed assurance, Jesus is mine” may often bring a perspective to issues that removes the debilitating effects of worry and anxiety which are, sometimes, incubating chambers for many of the more insidious non-communicable diseases.
Be that as it may, diet seems to be a critical component in the matrix of factors leading to such long lives.
We are indeed what we eat and in the absence of an abundance of money and disposable income, these hardy souls, for the majority of their early years and often of necessity, enjoyed a diet of unprocessed naturally grown foods.
Ground provision is the expression these wonderful seniors most often use in describing their diets. Such foods, as we now know, contain copious amounts of fibre, something which is missing from the popular processed and fast foods of modern times.
We cannot afford to lose sight of these lessons. Many of the answers to our modern problems of health and of social well being are to be found in the proper observance of the lives of our older citizens.
Their lived experiences hold many of the secrets of a well ordered life, lived in moderation and with a proper respect for the old fashioned values of thrift, hard work and a grounded belief in the power of the Almighty.
We may not wish to copy precisely every aspect of their lives, but every occasion on which we celebrate a centenarian’s milestone achievement is a major teachable moment for the solution to many of our manufactured problems of present-day living.
