Why Grow Old?
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You cannot be young by trying to appear so, by dressing youthfully.
You must first get rid of the last vestige of thought that you are aging.
As long as that is in the mind, cosmetics and youthful dress will amount to very little in changing your appearance.
The conviction must first be changed; the thought which has produced the aging condition must be reversed.
If we can only establish the perpetual-youth mental attitude, so that we feel young, we have won half the battle against old age.
Be sure of this, that whatever you feel regarding your age will be expressed in your body.
It is a great aid to the perpetuation of youth to learn to feel young, however long we may have lived, because the body expresses the habitual feeling, habitual thought.
Nothing in the world will make us look young as long as we are convinced that we are aging.
Nothing else more effectually retards age than the keeping in mind the bright, cheerful, optimistic, hopeful, buoyant picture of youth, in all its splendor, magnificence; the picture of the glories which belong to youth — youthful dreams, ideals, hopes, and all the qualities which belong to young life.
One great trouble with us is that our imaginations age prematurely. The hard, exacting conditions of our modern, strenuous life tend to harden and dry up the brain and nerve cells, and thus seriously injure the power of the imagination, which should be kept fresh, buoyant, and elastic.
The average routine habit of modern business life tends to destroy the flexibility, the delicacy, the sensitiveness, the exquisite fineness of the perceptive faculties.
People who take life too seriously, who seem to think everything depends upon their own individual efforts, whose lives are one continuous grind in living-getting, have a hard expression, their thought out-pictures itself in their faces.
These people dry up early in life and become wrinkled; their tissues become as hard as their thought.
The arbitrary, domineering, overbearing mind also tends to age the body prematurely, because the thinking is hard, strained, and abnormal.
People who live on the sunny and beautiful side of life and who cultivate serenity, do not age nearly as rapidly as do those who live on the shady, the dark side.
Another reason why so many people age prematurely is because they cease to grow. It is a lamentable fact that multitudes of men seem incapable of receiving or accepting new ideas after they have reached middle age.
Many of them, after they have reached the age of forty or fifty, come to a standstill in their mental reaching out.
Don’t think that you must “begin to take in sail,” to stop growing; stop progressing, just because you have gotten along in years. By this method of reasoning you will decline rapidly.
Never allow yourself to get out of the habit of being young. Do not say that you cannot do this or that as you once did. Live the life that belongs to youth.
Do not be afraid of being a boy or girl again in spirit, no matter how many years you have lived. Carry yourself so that you will not suggest old age in any of its phases.
Remember it is the stale mind, the stale mentality that ages the body. Keep growing, keep interested in everything about you.
It has been shown that the conviction that one is going to die at about a certain time, a certain age, tends to bring about the expected dissolution by strangling the life processes.
If you wish to retain your youth, forget unpleasant experiences, disagreeable incidents. A lady eighty years old was recently asked how she managed to keep herself so youthful. She replied: “I know how to forget disagreeable things.”
No one can remain youthful who does not continue to grow, and no one can keep growing who does not keep alive his interest in the great world about him. We are so constituted that we draw a large part of our nourishment from others.
No man can isolate himself; can cut himself off from his fellows, without shrinking in his mental stature. The mind that is not constantly reaching out for the new, as well as keeping in touch with the old, soon reaches its limit of growth.
Nothing else is easier than for a man to age. All he has to do is to think he is growing old; to expect it, to fear it, and prepare for it; to compare him with others of the same age who are prematurely old and to assume that he is like them.
To think constantly of the “end,” to plan for death, to prepare and provide for declining years, is simply to acknowledge that your powers are waning, that you are losing your grip upon life.
Such thinking tends to weaken your hold upon the life principle, and your body gradually corresponds with your conviction.
The very belief that our powers are waning; the consciousness that we are losing strength, that our vitality is lessening; the conviction that old age is settling upon us and that our life forces are gradually ebbing away, has a blighting, shriveling influence upon the mental faculties and functions; the whole character deteriorates under this old-age belief.
The result is that we do not use or develop the age-resisting forces within us.
The refreshening, renewing, resisting powers of the body are so reduced and impaired by the conviction that we are getting on in years and cannot stand what we once could, that we become an easy prey to disease and all sorts of physical infirmities.
The mental attitude has everything to do with the hastening or the retarding of the old-age condition.
Dr. Metchnikoff, of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, says that men should live at least one hundred and twenty years. There is no doubt that, as a race, we shorten our lives very materially through our false thinking, our bad living, and our old-age convictions.
A few years ago the London Lancet, the highest medical authority in the world, gave a splendid illustration of the power of the mind to keep the body young. A young woman, deserted by her lover, became insane.
She lost all consciousness of the passing of time. She believed her lover would return, and for years she stood daily before her window watching for him.
When over seventy years of age, some Americans, including physicians, who saw her, thought she was not over twenty. She did not have a single gray hair, and no wrinkles or other signs of age were visible.
Her skin was as fair and smooth as a young girl’s. She did not age because she believed she was still a girl. She did not count her birthdays or worry because she was getting along in years.
She was thoroughly convinced that she was still living in the very time that her lover left her. This mental belief controlled her physical condition. She was just as old as she thought she was. Her conviction out-pictured itself in her body and kept it youthful.
It is an insult to your Creator that your brain should begin to ossify, that your mental powers should begin to decline when you have only reached the half-century milestone. You ought then to be in your youth.
What has the appearance of old age to do with youth? What have gray hair, wrinkles, and other evidences of age to do with youth? Mental power should constantly increase.
There should be no decline in years. Increasing wisdom and power should be the only signs that you have lived long, that you have been many years on this planet.
Strength, beauty, magnificence, superiority, not weakness, uselessness, decrepitude, should characterize a man who has lived long.
As long as you hold the conviction that you are sixty, you will look it. Your thought will out-picture itself in your face, in your whole appearance. If you hold the old-age ideal, the old-age conviction, your expression must correspond. The body is the bulletin board of the mind.
On the other hand, if you think of yourself as perpetually young, vigorous, robust, and buoyant, because every cell in the body is constantly being renewed, decrepitude will not get hold of you.
If you would retain your youth, you must avoid the enemies of youth, and there are no greater enemies than the convictions of age and the gradual loss of interest in things, especially in youthful amusements and in the young life about you.
When you are no longer interested in the hopes and ambitions of young people; when you decline to enter into their sports, to romp and play with children, you confess in effect that you are growing old; that you are beginning to harden; that your youthful spirits are drying up, and that the juices of your younger days are evaporating. Nothing helps more to the perpetuation of youth than much association with the young.
A man quite advanced in years was asked not long ago how he retained such a youthful appearance in spite of his age. He said that he had been the principal of a high school for over thirty years; that he loved to enter into the life and sports of the young people and to be one of them in their ambitions and interests.
This, he said, had kept his mind centered on youth, progress, and abounding life, and the old-age thought had had no room for entrance.
There is not even a suggestion of age in this man’s conversation or ideas, and there is a life, buoyancy about him which is wonderfully refreshing.
There must be a constant activity in the mind that would not age. “Keep growing or die” is nature’s motto, a motto written all over everything in the universe.
Hold stoutly to the conviction that it is natural and right for you to remain young.
Constantly repeat to yourself that it is wrong, wicked for you to grow old in appearance; that weakness and decrepitude could not have been in the Creator’s plan for the man made in His image of perfection; that it must have been acquired — the result of wrong race and individual training and thinking.
Constantly affirm: “I am always well, always young, I cannot grow old except by producing the old-age conditions through my thought. The Creator intended me for continual growth, perpetual advancement and betterment, and I am not going to allow myself to be cheated out of my birthright of perennial youth.”
No matter if people do say to you: “You are getting along in years,” “You are beginning to show signs of age.” Just deny these appearances. Say to yourself: “Principle does not age, Truth does not grow old. I am Principle. I am Truth.”
Never go to sleep with the old-age picture or thought in your mind. It is of the utmost importance to make you feel young at night; to erase all signs, convictions, and feelings of age; to throw aside every care and worry that would carve its image on your brain and express itself in your face. The worrying mind actually generates calcareous matter in the brain and hardens the cells.
You should fall asleep holding those desires and ideals uppermost in the mind which are dearest to you; which you are the most anxious to realize. As the mind continues to work during sleep, these desires and ideals are thus intensified and increased.
It is well known that impure thoughts and desires work terrible havoc then. Purity of thought, loftiness of purpose, the highest possible aims, should dominate the mind when you fall asleep.
When you first wake in the morning, especially if you have reached middle life or later, picture the youthful qualities as vividly as possible. Say to yourself: “I am young, always young — strong — buoyant.
I cannot grow old and decrepit, because in the truth of my being I am divine, and Divine Principle cannot age. It is only the negative in me, the unreality that can take on the appearance of age.”
The great thing is to make the mind create the youth pattern instead of the old-age pattern. As the sculptor follows the model which he holds in the mind, so the life processes reproduce in the body the pattern which is in our thought, our conviction.
We must get rid of the idea embedded in our very nature that the longer we live, the more experiences we have, and the more work we do, the more inevitably we wear out and become old, decrepit, and useless.
We must learn that living, acting, experiencing, should not exhaust life but create more life. It is a law that action increases force. Where, then, did the idea come from that man, should wear out through action?
As a matter of fact, Nature has bestowed upon us perpetual youth, the power of perpetual renewal. There is not a single cell in our bodies that can possibly become old; the body is constantly being made new through cell-renewal, the cells of those parts of it that are most active being renewed oftenest. It must follow that the age-producing process is largely artificial and unnatural.
Physiologists tell us that the tissue cells of some muscles are renewed every few days, others every few weeks or months. The cells of the bone tissues are slower of renewal, but some authorities estimate that eighty or ninety per cent of all the cells in the body of a person of ordinary activity are entirely renewed in from six to twenty-four months.
Scientists have proved beyond question that the chemistry of the body has everything to do with the perpetuation of youthful conditions. Every discordant thought produces a chemical change in the cells, introducing foreign substances and causing reaction which is injurious to the integrity of the cells.
The impression of age is thus made upon new cells. This impression is the thought. If the thought is old, the age impress appears upon the cells. If the spirit of youth dominates the thought, the impression upon the cells is youthful.
In other words, the processes which result in age cannot possibly operate except through the mind, and the billions of cells composing the body are instantly affected by every thought that passes through the brain.
Putting old thoughts into a new set of cells is like putting new wine into old bottles. They don’t agree; they are natural enemies. The result is that two-year-old cells are made to look fifty, sixty, or more years old, according to the thought.
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Excerpted from Why Grow Old?
Written by classic writer Orison Swett Marden (founder of the original Success Magazine), this book from the early 20th Century will give you some incredible insights and ways into how you can retain your youthfulness.
Copyright © 1909 Orison Swett Marden Get the ebook at http://asamanthinketh.net/
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