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On Sunshine, Happiness, And Eternal Life

On Sunshine, Happiness, And Eternal Life

Last updated on: July 30, 2026 at 8:38 pm by Mary Pezzulo

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On Sunshine, Happiness, And Eternal Life 2026-07-30T20:38:05-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

sunshine reflecting off the bottom of a swimming pool

image via Pixabay

I was happy in the sunshine today.

I went to Toronto, the little town north of Steubenville, which has a glorious clean outdoor pool. The hours between ten and noon are their adult swim, where patrons over 18 can swim laps without the crowds and noise of the children who come later in the day. I put on my waterproof SPF 70, carefully coating my arms and shoulders, because it was a bright day and my skin is very fair.

Swimming is my favorite exercise, and swimming at the outdoor pool is the best. I love swimming at the rec center in their indoor pool. I also love swimming at the muddy lake, with the shore birds flying by and the forest surrounding me on all sides. But my favorite place to swim is a clean, cool pool on a bright warm sunny day. The way the sun glimmers on the water is so stunning I wish I could paint it. When I was a little girl, I wished I could have a blue dress with gold zigzags on it exactly mimicking the glimmer of sun on the bottom of a pool. This was the ideal day for a swim: sunny, hot, not too humid, with the water sparkling and just cool enough. I skimmed back and forth across the blue and gold water, drinking in the sunshine and the puffy cumulus clouds, admiring the green shale hills that rise up to embrace the whole town of Toronto in every direction you look. My arms are getting muscular with all of this swimming. I have defined shoulders for the first time. I would like to swim every week for the rest of my life.

I got home, with the slick glaze and coconut smell of sunscreen still sticking to my skin. A few years ago I had to have several spots removed from my back and shoulders, and two of them turned out to be “mildly abnormal:” not cancer, but the kind of mutation that turns into cancer if you leave it indefinitely. The others were ordinary blotches for a woman in her 40s who likes to play outside. I used to spend hours and hours every summer day at my grandfather’s backyard pool, swimming in the water or lying on my stomach reading a book. No one thought about skin cancer in the 80s and early 90s. We had a bottle of SPF 5 “dark tanning lotion,” expired by a few years, stored in the bath house, but of course that wasn’t protection. I baked in the sun year after year, and now I have brown spots on my back. I try as hard as I can to remember the SPF 70 with the waterproof guarantee.

When I got home, Jimmy’s boy was there. He showed me his brand new hatchet, not a toy but a real blade, and asked if I had any wood he could cut, “But I need adult supervision.” I stood out in that amazing sunshine and watched him for several minutes. He hacked and hacked at the cedar bush, breaking off a branch that smelled like Christmas. Next, he took a handful of bush beans to eat raw from the garden. I stayed outside for a long time after he left. I treated the squash plants for bugs and inspected the other crops: the broccoli is forming florets and I’ve actually got a tiny watermelon, a bit bigger than a golf ball. The tomatoes are ripening fast in all this wonderful light. I wouldn’t say my tastes are the healthiest, but growing them myself outdoors in the sunshine means I actually have an appetite for healthy food. If I didn’t garden I would eat nothing but junk.

When I finally went inside, I got online.

There is an influencer on social media named Bryan Johnson. I suppose he’s about as different from me as day is from night.

He lives in Los Angeles in a sprawling mansion in the Venice neighborhood, and I live in a rental in Northern Appalachia. His net worth is about $300 million, and I made the mistake of taking out student loans so I am worth negative six figures. He is an entrepreneur who thinks about numbers all day, and I have a bit of dyscalculia and can barely do my own taxes. Bryan Johnson wants to live forever.

This man’s entire life is consumed by supplements and experimental medical treatments, a strict sleep and exercise regimen, intermittent fasting, and a mushy blend of health foods. He keeps a running calculation of it all, confidently boasting of how far he’s reversed his aging, as if age is an exact number like a dollar amount on a spreadsheet. His ultimate goal is to be the king, or rather more like the Pope, of his own little “network state” where longevity is revered above all, a different sort of religion with a different sort of eternal life. AI is involved, of course.

In every photograph and video I’ve seen of Johnson, he has an awkward, blank expression on his face. He doesn’t look very happy. But he certainly does have an immaculate complexion with no moles at all. I am jealous of that skin. He’s five years older than me and he looks like he could be my son.

Yesterday, Johnson was talking about the sun, and his pale perfect epidermis. “I love the sun. I wish I could be in it all day, everyday. That’s what I did as a kid. Since starting my longevity project, I learned there is a tradeoff to sun exposure. It ages your skin, driving deep wrinkles, skin laxity and sun spots. 90% of visible skin aging is from the sun. Becoming sun aware for the past five years, I’ve reversed my skin age by 9 years. I’ve learned, nothing in biology is free. It always cuts two ways.”

He went on to describe the properties of UVA and UVB rays, the most dangerous times to be outdoors, the way the sun breaks down the collagen. I couldn’t quite follow his explanation about how the sun mutates your DNA, but I suppose it’s correct because I had those two mutant spots on my back. Nothing he said was completely untrue. The skin is an organ. Organs fail and die. There are things you can do to eke out their youth a little more; staying away from the sun is one of them.

But what kind of life is that?

What’s the point of living forever, if you never get any sunshine?

I’m not saying you shouldn’t try and live healthily. I have found ways to be healthy that are also fun. I go swimming and hiking outside in the sunshine because it’s good for me, and because it makes me happy. I grow vegetables because they’re healthy and because it’s fun to grow them. I eat foods that taste good and don’t make me sick. I play with the neighborhood children because they make me happy. These activities are a trade-off. They’re good for me, and they also have risks. A few years ago I got terrible food poisoning from not carefully washing my hands after turning over the compost and then harvesting some vegetables, so I use a vegetable wash now. And I guess being outside so often has aged me, so I wear sunscreen.

My skin is aging because that’s what skin does. My arms and back are dotted with freckles, and that will get worse with age. The skin at the top of my chest is a bit darker than the skin that’s covered by my shirt, and that will darken with age as well. I have crow’s feet around my eyes and lines on my forehead at forty-two. Some people don’t start aging visibly until they’re older than I am, and some people begin aging in their thirties. I take reasonable precautions to stave off the worst effects of the sun. I would rather not have cancer. But I am mortal. I am middle aged. I am going to die, of something, before too much longer. In the meanwhile, I get to be happy.

Yes, I’m a Catholic. Yes, I believe in life after death. But I also believe in life, right now, BEFORE death. I believe that there’s far more to life than feeling happy in the here and now, but happiness is still important. I believe that the true road to joy is to love your neighbor as yourself, but that does involve learning to love your own self. I believe that a life that’s painful is still worth living. I’ve had very painful times. But I think that, all other things being equal, God would prefer us to be happy in this life as well.

It makes me sad to think of somebody with hundreds of millions of dollars, who not only doesn’t give the bulk of it away to help his neighbors, but also spends it all on something so miserable. At least be decadent and have some fun. Why would you want to eke your life out as long as you can, if you can’t even enjoy it?

No one, including rich people, is going to live forever. Bodies have an expiration date. Organs, such as the skin, grow old and fail, and then you die. There are things you can do to stave that off, but not eternally.

Everyone, including rich people, is going to live forever, in a different way. One of the purposes of this life on earth, is to get ready for the time when this life on earth is over. One of the ways I’m doing that is by learning to love the Creator, by appreciating how beautiful Creation is. Sunshine. Water. Plants. I think this is a better use of my time, than putting off the inevitable to the last possible moment.

Jimmy’s boy came over again in the evening. He and I picked twelve cherry tomatoes, of which he took home six. I promised I’d take him to the pool with Adrienne next week, during the open swim, and then out on another hike before long.

After he went in, I stood in the garden, eating my half of the cherry tomatoes, while a goldfinch who likes my sunflowers sang overhead.

Life is short, and good.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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