Today's Wisdom - Founding Fathers, Eclipses and Community

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When most people picture the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence, they imagine a room full of dignified elderly statesmen with powdered wigs solemnly pledging their lives to freedom. The reality was far messier than that myth suggests. The average age of the signers was only 44, and some, like 26 year old Edward Rutledge, were shockingly young by today's standards. Benjamin Franklin, at 70, was the exception rather than the rule, and he spent most of the Constitutional Convention so debilitated by gout and kidney stones that he had to be carried into Independence Hall in a sedan chair hoisted by prisoners from the Walnut Street Jail. While the others debated, Franklin would sit quietly, occasionally passing witty notes to neighbors, including one where he admitted he spent the time studying the carved sun on George Washington's chair, trying to determine whether it was rising or setting.

Thomas Jefferson, who penned the immortal line "all men are created equal," owned more than 600 enslaved people over his lifetime and fathered at least six children with Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved who was also his late wife's half-sister. He was also an obsessive tinkerer who invented a rotating bookstand, a mechanical dumbwaiter, and a cipher wheel for encoding messages, yet he died $107,000 in debt (roughly $2 million today) because he couldn't stop buying books and French wine. Alexander Hamilton, the immigrant outsider who designed America's financial system, was so reckless with his personal finances that he died nearly broke after spending his final years paying back loans. He was also involved in America's first major sex scandal when he published a 95-page pamphlet confessing in excruciating detail to an extramarital affair, purely to prove he hadn't committed financial crimes, a decision that baffled even his closest friends.

The strangest details emerge when you look at their daily habits and final days. George Washington, the man synonymous with stoic leadership, was also a passionate dog breeder who gave his foxhounds names like "Sweet Lips," "Drunkard," and "Madame Moose," and he spent a fortune on his teeth, which were not wooden as legend suggests but rather a horrifying combination of ivory and animal teeth. John Adams started every morning by drinking a tankard of hard cider and lived to be 90, outliving most of his peers through sheer stubbornness. He and Thomas Jefferson, once close friends who became bitter political enemies before reconciling through letters, both died on the exact same day: July 4, 1826, precisely fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was signed. Adams' last words were reportedly "Thomas Jefferson survives," unaware that Jefferson had died just hours earlier at Monticello. Five years later, James Monroe also died on July 4, 1831, making three of the first five presidents who exited the world on the nation's birthday, as if they had coordinated one final dramatic flourish from beyond the grave.

For most of human history, eclipses were treated as cosmic catastrophes that required immediate action. Ancient Chinese astronomers believed a celestial dragon was devouring the sun, and they would bang drums and shoot arrows into the sky to scare it away. The Vikings thought wolves were hunting the sun and moon across the heavens. Even Christopher Columbus used his knowledge of an upcoming lunar eclipse to terrify indigenous Jamaicans into giving him supplies by claiming he would make the moon disappear. The truth behind eclipses is far more elegant than dragons or wolves, and it relies on a coincidence so statistically improbable that it borders on the miraculous. The sun is about 400 times larger than the moon, but it also happens to be roughly 400 times farther away from Earth. This means that from our perspective, the two objects appear almost exactly the same size in the sky, allowing the moon to perfectly block out the sun during a total solar eclipse.

A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes directly between Earth and the sun, casting a shadow that races across the planet's surface at up to 2,900 kilometers per hour. This shadow has two parts: the umbra, a narrow cone of total darkness where the sun is completely blocked, and the penumbra, a larger region of partial shadow. If you stand in the umbra's path, which is rarely wider than 270 kilometers, you experience totality, where the sky goes dark, stars appear, and the sun's corona blazes around the moon's silhouette. The entire show lasts no more than seven and a half minutes at any given location because the moon's shadow is moving so fast across Earth's surface that you quite literally cannot keep up with it.

What makes this arrangement even more remarkable is that it's temporary on a cosmic timescale. The moon is slowly drifting away from Earth at a rate of about 3.8 centimeters per year, which means that in roughly 600 million years, it will be too far away to fully cover the sun. Total solar eclipses will cease to exist, replaced only by annular eclipses where a ring of sunlight remains visible around the moon's edges. We are living in the narrow window of Earth's history where our moon is at the perfect distance to create one of the universe's most spectacular alignments. Ancient Babylonians were able to predict eclipses with startling accuracy using nothing but centuries of meticulous records, discovering that eclipses repeat in cycles called the Saros, which lasts 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours. They understood the pattern without understanding the mechanics, perhaps the most human way to approach the cosmos: we see the rhythm before we grasp the reason.

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When researchers at Harvard started tracking the health of 724 men in 1938, they expected to find that diet, exercise, or genetics would be the strongest predictor of a long, happy life. Eighty-five years later, the answer was far simpler: relationships. People who regularly eat with others show measurably lower levels of cortisol, the stress hormone that, when chronically elevated, physically shrinks the hippocampus, the part of your brain responsible for memory. Their immune systems produce more antibodies when exposed to viruses, and their blood pressure drops during shared meals in a way so pronounced that cardiologists now consider social isolation as dangerous as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

The chemistry of shared meals reveals something even more precise about human connection. When you eat with someone you trust, your brain releases oxytocin, the same bonding hormone that floods a mother's system during childbirth. This isn't just warm feelings, oxytocin actively suppresses inflammation in your cardiovascular system and triggers the vagus nerve, which slows your heart rate and aids digestion. Studies from Japan's Ohsaki cohort found that elderly people who ate alone had a 1.5 times higher risk of developing depression and a significantly faster cognitive decline compared to those who shared daily meals. Oxford economist Robin Dunbar quantified the effect in stark terms: sharing eight or more meals a week with other people delivers the same happiness boost as doubling your income.

The long-term data paints an even more dramatic picture of what we're losing. The Alameda County Study, which tracked 7,000 people over nine years, found that socially isolated individuals had mortality rates two to three times higher than those with strong social ties, even after controlling for age, gender, and pre-existing health conditions. The effect held across every cause of death: heart disease, cancer, stroke. Meanwhile, a 2023 analysis of blue zones (which you can read about in one of our previous editions), regions where people routinely live past 100, revealed that centenarians in Okinawa, Sardinia, and Ikaria don't have better genes or exotic superfoods. What they have is ritual: multi-generational family dinners, walking groups, and weekly gatherings that aren't optional. In Okinawa, they call it "moai," a lifelong social circle that meets regularly to eat, talk, and simply exist together. The meal isn't just food, it's medicine.

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Until next time... A Little Wiser Team