I recently watched an interview with a National Geographic explorer named, Dan Buettner, who has been studying life longevity for over two decades. He is convinced that what most people think leads to a long life is misguided or wrong. “It’s not that we don’t try,” he says. “After all, we spend billions of dollars a year on diet plans, gym memberships, and health supplements, and yet our life expectancy is dropping for the first time in a hundred years… and two-thirds of the world’s population will die prematurely from preventable disease.” Beauttner was persuaded of this after identifying five outliers he calls Blue Zones–the places in the world with the healthiest, longest-living populations. Remarkably, blue zone populations have several common denominators, causing inhabitants to live longer, and better, without trying. Since this discovery, Buettner has been reverse engineering longevity by studying blue zones and asking: “What if we stopped trying to prevent death, and learned how to live?”
Which got me thinking… What if Following the Leader is less about trying and more about being… in a Christ-like blue zone?