Ikigai

There is a small village in the north of Okinawa called Ogimi, where an unusual number of people live past a hundred. Two writers, Héctor García and Francesc Miralles, went there to find out why. What they brought back became a little book called Ikigai. I picked it up expecting a light read for a flight. It stayed with me far longer than the flight did.

A Reason for Being

Ikigai is a Japanese word that means, more or less, a reason for being. The thing that gets a person out of bed in the morning. The people of Ogimi, it seems, never had much trouble finding theirs.

• They stay active: Gardens, friends and small daily tasks keep them busy well into old age. Many of them never really retire.
• They eat until about 80% full: In Okinawa they call it hara hachi bu. Simply stopping a little before feeling full.
• They look after each other: Friends meet often, and nobody is left on their own for long.
• They do what they love: They lose themselves in things they enjoy, so the hours pass without notice. The book calls this flow.

Looking After Each Other

There is something else about Ogimi that stayed with me. The people there are rarely alone. In Okinawa, they even have a word for it: moai. A moai is a small circle of friends who promise to stand by one another for life. They meet, they share the news of the day, and they carry each other through the hard seasons. In the old tradition, each of them puts a little money into a common pot, so that whoever needs it most can draw from it. Some of these circles begin in childhood and are still meeting well into old age. Reading about it, I thought of arisan back home in Indonesia. Friends, neighbours or family gather, each puts in a little money, and one person takes the pot each round. On paper, it is about money. In truth, it is a reason to sit together, eat and catch up.

What moves me about both is the loyalty. This is not friendship of convenience, the kind that lasts only as long as it is useful. It is something closer to brotherhood. People simply show up for one another, year after year, in good times and in bad. The book suggests that this sense of belonging is one of the quiet reasons the people of Ogimi live so long. I believe that. Knowing there are people who will always show up may be the oldest medicine there is.

For me, loyalty is one of the most important things in life. And having that kind of brotherhood in my life is a gift. A very special one.

Doing What They Love

And then there is the matter of how they spend their days. The people of Ogimi do the things they genuinely love: tending their gardens, cooking, making things with their hands, sitting with friends. Nobody asks them to. They simply keep at it, year after year, well into old age. The book ties this to an idea called flow, first described by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It is that state where I become so absorbed in something that the hours fall away, and for a little while, so do I.

Here is the curious thing. Flow asks for nothing special. No grand goal. No audience. Only a task that is neither too easy nor too hard, done one thing at a time, with full attention. The villagers find it in ordinary work. The book also tells of Japanese craftspeople who spend an entire lifetime perfecting a single skill, and who seem to find a quiet joy in every small improvement.