The Soldier Who Forgot to Die

A Japanese Soldier was found last year on a small Pacific island, still protecting a cave of emergency provisions for the Japanese army.  He looked through binoculars daily to spot enemy ships, not realizing that World War II ended in 1945.  Newspaper articles said that he was a disciplined man.

But here is something even more amazing.  He arrived on the island in 1944 when he was forty-five years old.  Today, he is one hundred and sixteen, but he hasn't aged a day.  His metabolism didn't have access to a calendar and so the cells of his body had no reason to grow old.  He wasn't a practitioner of Zen, but he was able to live in the moment for seventy-one years.

A lot of people are now looking for deserted islands in the Pacific.  As Wordsworth wrote, the world is too much with us.

~William Hammett

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