KEEPING FIT. Orison Swett Marden

      Chapter I.

       Keeping Fit

       Table of Contents

      Health is the vital principle of life.—Thomson.

      Who well lives, long lives; for this age of ours

      Should not be numbered by years, days, and hours,

      —G. de S. Du Baktas.

      Nor love nor honor, wealth nor power,

      Can give the heart a cheerful hour

      When health is lost. Be timely wise;

      With health all taste of pleasure flies.

      —John Gay.

      The thousand little hints which may save or lengthen life, may repel or abate disease, or the simple laws which regulate our bodily vigor, should be so familiar that we may be quick to apply them in an emergency. The preservation of health is easier than the cure of disease.—J. Dorman Steele.

      Nature demands that man be ever at the top of his condition. He who violates her laws must pay the penalty though he sit on a throne.

      Physical vigor is a tremendous success as well as happiness asset.

      The reserve of readiness is the secret of all achievement. The grandest work a human being can do is to keep himself fit for the greatest thing he is capable of doing, the highest service he is capable of rendering; always up to the level of his greatest efficiency.

      To keep fit is to maintain perfect health; and perfect health depends upon a perfect balance of mind and body, unimpaired physical vigor and absolute inner harmony, and a calm, mental poise which nothing can disturb.

      Every normal human being can, if he will, raise himself to this condition. He can live in such a simple yet scientific manner that he will not only have great disease-resisting power but will also be at the maximum of his creative ability.

      When the body is in superb physical condition, it stimulates the mind and develops its maximum of the force that creates, that accomplishes. When the body is down the mind is down, all life’s standards are down, and the whole nature is demoralized. No one can be healthy or harmonious with a morbid or pessimistic outlook on life, for this produces physical and mental depression, the forerunner of ill health.

      Not only disease catches him whose vitality, physical resiliency and resisting power are low, but mediocrity marks him also, because all his mental standards are down, too.

      I criticized a carpenter working for me recently for using dull tools. He excused himself by saying that he had been too busy to sharpen them. He had been working for weeks with a dull saw, and with a plane which had notches in it, leaving ugly ridges on the boards he was planing. He had probably wasted more time in working with dull tools than would have been required to sharpen them several times, to say nothing of the inferior work he was turning out.

      Many people go through life doing their work with dull tools just as this carpenter did. The edge is off their energy; their ambition is dull; their initiative lags; their enthusiasm is exhausted; their will-power is weak; their intelligence is blunted; all their powers are at the minimum instead of the maximum of their efficiency, because they have neglected their health or in some other way reduced their efficiency by failing to keep fit.

      The most precious capital a man has are his deposits of life force, of vitality and of reserve power, in his physical bank; and there is nothing which will lead to bankruptcy of a man’s life quicker than neglect or abuse of his health capital. A man too busy to take care of his health is like the workman too busy to sharpen his tools. Anything that produces, should be kept in a condition to produce the largest possible output.

      What should we think of a man who had an enormous gold-mine, but carelessly cut down its possible output seventy-five per cent? Yet, most of us cut down the possible output of our brains, our energies, even more than seventy-five per cent, by our carelessness, strangling or crippling our sources of power. We should think it pretty bad economy for an engineer, who had a power plant capable of producing a hundred thousand horse power, to utilize only ten per cent, of it. Yet that is precisely what most of us do with our physical powers.

      Now, health squandered can never be compensated for by the mere acquisition of money. It is simply lack of intelligence that causes any one to barter health for wealth. A well-balanced man would find the way to have both with detriment to neither.

      The lowering of physical vitality by unscientific living, by vicious practices, or by dissipation, correspondingly lowers our general efficiency, mentality, and will-power.

      Some of the largest employers in the country tell me that many employees come to their work in the morning so completely used