Indecision is also a great waster of power. People who are always weighing, balancing, and reconsidering little dream that they are thus squandering a lot of precious health capital. How many, too, burn up in fierce gusts of passion, or dribble away in nagging, bickering, or needless faultfinding, a large amount of brain power and physical vitality that might be used not only to great advantage in bettering their condition but also the condition of those whose lives they touch.
A morbid idea, such as hatred, envy, or jealousy long harbored in the mind acts like a poison-leaven and works its way through the entire system, injuring the whole life. The majority of people have very little conception of the fearful destructiveness of thoughts of hatred or revenge. They are like great festering sore centers, distributing their poisons to every part of the body, while their evil influence on the mind cannot be estimated. We should always be on the watch to stamp out such thoughts; also other morbid, gloomy ideas which so frequently attack us. We all know how religious morbidities unbalance the mind. It doesn’t matter how sacred the subject which possesses us; if we allow ourselves to become morbid over it, it unbalances us just the same; the tendency of morbidity is always to unsettle the mind.
It is now well known that extreme selfishness, envy, and jealousy will produce neuralgic headaches and other mental and physical disturbances. But perhaps the most destructive of all these vitality leaks, in its effects on the physical and mental system, is a violent, uncontrolled temper. If people only knew what tremendous havoc a fit of anger works in the delicate nervous system, and the really dangerous results of an unchecked storm of passion, they never again could be tempted to yield to it.
In an instant the nerves surrounding the blood vessels are paralyzed by the mental shock of a sudden burst of anger and the blood rushes into the brain with such terrific force that sometimes a blood vessel is ruptured and death is almost instantaneous. Dr. John Hunter, one of the greatest surgeons that ever lived, died in the board-room of St. George’s Hospital, London, in a fit of anger. One of his colleagues intimated that something he, Dr. Hunter, had said was untrue. The insinuation aroused a temper storm that precipitated an acute attack of angina pectoris, from which he was suffering, and almost in an instant he fell dead.
A noted Paris physician reports a case of a young man who, in a violent quarrel with his relatives, worked himself up into such a fearful passion that he became suddenly deaf. It is not an unusual thing for a severe attack of jaundice to follow a violent fit of anger. People little realize how their very lives are endangered, how their health is often seriously impaired, and how many habitually suffer from semi-invalidism, because they are constantly giving way to these anger fits.
We are just beginning to find that what we always regarded as minor things, such as our fits of temper, our frettings, our anxieties, our fears, our petty jealousies, or our revengeful thoughts, are in reality very formidable foes,—enemies of our mental poise and balance, enemies of our fitness, which is power. These are the things which keep us unfit.
The worry leaks, the fear leaks, the anxiety leaks, the hot-temper leaks, the dissipation leaks, the leaks from sleeplessness and lack of system, the jealousy leaks are all draining away precious power and reducing our mental and physical fitness for the important tasks of life. They are all the time cutting down our vitality and our initiative, weakening our confidence and courage. Under their influence every faculty deteriorates in power, in forcefulness.
How many of us go through life wondering why we do not get on faster, wondering what it is that holds us down when we try so hard to get on! We are always looking over and blaming some fundamental thing that is blocking our progress, handicapping our career, when in reality it is often a multitude of these little enemies of which we take no note, and think of very seldom, which are neutralizing our advantages. In the first place, all those things seriously affect our health. Whatever disturbs us, or destroys mental harmony, does corresponding harm in the body. Whatever exercises a malign influence on the health, will do the same thing to the mind, and vice versa. It is now well known that thought is not confined to the brain, for we think all over the entire nervous system; in fact, every cell in the body participates in our thinking.
All these enemies must be eradicated, routed out of the nature before we can be at the top of our condition, be perfectly fit, healthy, harmonious, and effective. We must cut out all disease-bearing morbidities; rout out of life’s garden all disease weeds or other rank growths, physical or mental, which are poisoning everything that is beautiful and fruitful.
Perfect health, which is perfect fitness, means also perfect morals. A person cannot be perfectly healthy and yet be morally bad. If we practice dishonesty, if we are envious or revengeful, we cannot be perfectly healthy, because perfect health means physical and mental harmony.
The physical functions are very largely dependent upon both the mental and the moral condition. A person, for example, who is suffering the pangs of remorse for some wicked deed, cannot be thoroughly healthy. Sometimes, it is true, we see vicious characters who are physically strong, robust; but that is not enough for the man God made. The spiritual nature must match the physical. Perfect health means perfect wholeness, and no one is whole, complete, who is not happy; and no one is happy whose conscience is all the time torturing him. A very wicked person may have good digestion and appear physically to be well, but he is not whole and such a person does not, as a rule, attain a ripe old age. Moreover, he does not attain the purpose of life. Instead of being of use to society, which is the duty of every human being, he is a curse to himself and to the world.
Keeping fit is the result of healthful habits,—right habits of living, right habits of thinking. It is the product of regularity of life, regular sleep, in full sufficiency, regular recreation, and plenty of it, regular exercise in the open air, habits of neatness and cleanliness and orderliness, habits which contribute to self-respect and make us think more of ourselves; and, above all else, these should be combined with a habit of wise and systematic eating and drinking and an intelligent choice of food which shall contain all the elements, in proper proportion, requisite to build up and maintain the different organs and tissues of the body,—food which will produce vigor, food which has stored up in it the forces of nature which produce energy, brain power, vigor of thought, grasp of intellect.
In the work of keeping fit our thought-food is, next to our physical food, the great mind and body builder.
If you would keep fit, never picture yourself as anything different from what you would actually be, the man or woman you long to become. Whenever you think of yourself, form a mental image of a perfect, healthy, beautiful, noble being, not lacking in anything, but possessing every desirable quality. Insist upon seeing only the truth of your being, the man or woman God had in mind when He made you.
There is every evidence in the human plan that He intended man to express completeness, wholeness,—not a half or other fraction of himself; a hundred, not twenty-five or fifty per cent, of his possibilities; to express excellence, not mediocrity, and that the half lives and quarter lives which we see everywhere are abnormal.
One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in keeping fit is that we build our bodies by our thoughts as much as by our material food. It is a literal fact that man does not live by bread alone; our bodies are discordant or harmonious, diseased or healthy, in accordance with our habitual thought. There are those who, having learned this lesson, have had their countenances so altered in a single year by persistent right-thinking that one would scarcely know them. ' They have changed faces that were lined with doubt, disfigured with fear and anxiety, and scarred by worry or vice, to reflectors of hope, cheer, and joy.
Saint Paul was scientific when he said: “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds;” that is, by changing, ennobling, purifying and freshening one’s thoughts.
Keeping fit means that the mind shall be as clean, pure, and healthy as the body. It is every one’s sacred duty to keep himself fit, up to the highest possible standard, physically