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July 26, 2022 - February 3, 2023
Miyazaki can’t stop drawing. The day after his “retirement,” instead of going on vacation or staying at home, he went to Studio Ghibli and sat down to draw. His colleagues put on their best poker faces, not knowing what to say. One year later, he announced he wouldn’t make any more feature films but that he would keep on drawing until the day he died.
Can someone really retire if he is passionate about what he does?
Meditation is one way to exercise our mental muscles. There are many types of meditation, but they all have the same objective: calming the mind, observing our thoughts and emotions, and centering our focus on a single object.
If we want to get better at reaching a state of flow, meditation is an excellent antidote to our smartphones and their notifications constantly clamoring for our attention.
Meditation generates alpha and theta brain waves.
We all carry a spa with us everywhere we go. It’s just a matter of knowing how to get in—something anyone can do, with a bit of practice.
The main religions in Japan—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shintoism—are all ones in which the rituals are more important than absolute rules.
What is indisputable, though, is that finding flow in a “ritualistic workplace” is much easier than in one in which we are continually stressed out trying to achieve unclear goals set by our bosses.
Rituals give us clear rules and objectives, which help us enter a state of flow.
When confronted with a big goal, try to break it down into parts and then attack each part one by one.
Focus on enjoying your daily rituals, using them as tools to enter a state of flow.
The happiest people are not the ones who achieve the most. They are the ones who spend more time than others in a state of flow.
Write all of them on a piece of paper, then ask yourself these questions: What do the activities that drive you to flow have in common? Why do those activities drive you to flow? For example, are all the activities you most like doing ones that you practice alone or with other people? Do you flow more when doing things that require you to move your body or just to think?
Art, in all its forms, is an ikigai that can bring happiness and purpose to our days. Enjoying or creating beauty is free, and something all human beings have access to.
The sense of community, and the fact that Japanese people make an effort to stay active until the very end, are key elements of their secret to long life. If you want to stay busy even when there’s no need to work, there has to be an ikigai on your horizon, a purpose that guides you throughout your life and pushes you to make things of beauty and utility for the community and yourself.
She is extroverted, and rather pretty. She likes to talk about her role as the director of several associations run by the local government.
“Food won’t help you live longer,” she says, bringing to her lips a bite of the diminutive confection that followed our meal. “The secret is smiling and having a good time.”
Ryukyu is the original name of the Okinawa archipelago, and Shinto means “the path of the gods.”
Ancestor worship is another important feature of spiritual practice in Okinawa, and in Japan in general. The home of each generation’s firstborn usually contains a butsudan, or small altar, used to pray for and make offerings to the family’s ancestors.
“The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”2
Don’t worry
Cultivate good habits
Nurture your friendships every day
Live an unhurried life
Be optimistic
Experts point out that, for one thing, Okinawa is the only province in Japan without trains. Its residents have to walk or cycle when not driving. It is also the only province that has managed to follow the Japanese government’s recommendation of eating less than ten grams of salt per day.
Locals eat a wide variety of foods, especially vegetables.
They eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables every day
“eating the rainbow.” A table featuring red peppers, carrots, spinach, cauliflower, and eggplant, for example, offers great color and variety. Vegetables, potatoes, legumes, and soy products such as tofu are the staples of an Okinawan’s diet. More than 30 percent of their daily calories comes from vegetables.
Grains are the foundation of their diet
They rarely eat sugar, and if they do, it’s cane sugar.
anticarcinogenic benefits of sugarcane.
Okinawans eat fish an average of three times per week;
In fact, low caloric intake is common among the five Blue Zones.
When you notice you’re almost full but could have a little more . . . just stop eating!
One easy way to start applying the concept of hara hachi bu is to skip dessert. Or to reduce portion size. The idea is to still be a little bit hungry when you finish.
Instead, it’s much more common to see everything presented at once on small plates: one with rice, another with vegetables, a bowl of miso soup, and something to snack on.
Serving food on many small plates makes it easier to avoid eating too much, and facilitates the varied diet discussed at the beginning of this chapter.
Hara hachi bu is an ancient practice. The twelfth-century book on Zen Buddhism Zazen Youjinki recommends eating two-thirds as much as you might want to. Eating less than one might want is common among all Buddhist temples in the East. Perhaps Buddhism recognized...
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The key to staying healthy while consuming fewer calories is eating foods with a high nutritional value (especially “superfoods”) and avoiding those that add to our overall caloric intake but offer little to no nutritional value.
If the body regularly consumes enough, or too many, calories, it gets lethargic and starts to wear down, expending significant energy on digestion alone.
Another benefit of calorie restriction is that it reduces levels of IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor 1) in the body. IGF-1 is a protein that plays a significant role in the aging process; it seems that one of the reasons humans and animals age is an excess of this protein in their blood.2
calorie restriction with adequate nutrition has a powerful protective effect against obesity, type 2 diabetes, inflammation, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease and reduces metabolic risk factors associated with cancer.3
An alternative to following the 80 percent rule on a daily basis is to fast for one or two days each week. The 5:2 (or fasting) diet recommends two days of fasting (consuming fewer than five hundred calories) every week and eating normally on the other five days. Among its many benefits, fasting helps cleanse the digestive system and allows it to rest.
