If you wish to demonstrate the difference between the control of the physical body by brain impulse and the spinal cord impulse, try this some morning: Start out on your walk, and mentally frame sentences like this as you walk, "right step, left step, right step, left step," and so on; give thought to each step you have taken and notice how tired you will be when you have gone half a mile.
The next morning start to walk, walk naturally, give no thought to walking, keep your mind on the beauties of nature by which you are pa.s.sing or in pleasant soliloquy and you will feel no fatigue.
There isn"t a bit of theory in this chapter; it is positive practical sense I have proved by my own experiences and by the experiences of everyone to whom I have made this suggestion of walking alone.
The moral is this--walk every morning and walk ALONE.
ELIMINATION
The Body"s Safety-First in Keeping Health
The body is made up of billions of little cells. These individual cells are in a state of perpetual activity. They exhaust, wear away, break down with work and rebuild on food and rest. Every process of life--the beat of the heart, the throb of the brain in thought, the digestion of food, the excretion of waste--all are due to the activity of groups of highly specialized individual cells.
Every cell uses up its own material and throws off poisonous by-products during activity. These by-products, or wastes, are very poisonous to the individual cell as well as to the entire organism. To get rid of this waste is one of the first duties of the system.
It is with the body, made up of its countless millions of individual cells, just as with a city and its myriad people: the sewage of the community must be collected and disposed of. The city forms its poisons which we call sewage and the body its poisons, which we call excreta (or carbonic acid, urea, uric acid, faeces, etc.) It is no more important for a city to gather up and get rid of its poisonous sewage than for the animal organism to collect and excrete its cell-waste. Hence, the importance of maintaining normal and constant elimination throughout the body.
Elimination is kept up by the alimentary tract, the kidneys, the skin, and the lungs.
These four are the great pipe-line sewerage systems so to speak, by which the body throws off its gaseous, liquid and solid poisons.
The lungs momentarily strain carbonic acid out of the blood and throw it out in the expired air. They likewise exhale other noxious matters from the system.
The alimentary tract throws off faeces, made up of the waste tissue from the whole system, especially the digestive organs, as well as indigestible and non-nutritious portions of the food.
The kidneys strain out urea, uric acid, and certain other poisons from the blood and eject them through the urinary tract.
Finally the skin likewise is an excretory organ and exhales a very definite amount of gaseous and fluid waste in the course of each twenty-four hours.
The skin throws off from a pint to two quarts of liquid each day in the form of vapor.
Thus, to carry on normal elimination from the body, the breathing, digesting, urinary and cutaneous systems must be kept working normally.
To impair the work of any of these is to r.e.t.a.r.d bodily drainage. To insure that elimination is going on naturally it is necessary to secure perfect functioning of lungs, bowels, kidneys and the skin.
Any stoppage in the process of elimination means that some fault has crept into the work of one of these excretory systems. It must be plain now why a disorder of any one of these organs of elimination means so much more profound disturbance to the whole organization than merely disease in one structure; it means that waste products are retained which ought to be thrown out of the body; so straightway every cell in the body begins to be more or less affected. Some poisons disturb one organ more and some another, but in the end the whole body must be affected.
Lack of exercise, bolting of food, eating soft, starchy things, failure to chew properly, failure to get enough roughage, insufficient water, insufficient fruit, these are the general causes of stoppage in the elimination processes.
Drink one or two gla.s.ses of warm, not hot, water first thing in the morning.
Eat one or two apples, skins and all, every day. Eat toast, especially the crust, eat cracked wheat or whole wheat bread often.
Exercise plenty. Keep cheerful, eat regularly.
Very likely you eat too much. You don"t need three big meals a day unless you work out doors at hard physical labor.
Your body is an engine. No use to keep the boiler red hot and two hundred pounds of steam if your work is light.
Good health depends upon proper a.s.similation and elimination as nature intended.
Eat less, exercise more, you who work indoors. If you don"t use this caution you are just slowly killing yourself.
CONTINUOUS HAPPINESS
An Impossible State, and It"s Well It"s So
I am often asked, "Are you happy ALL the time?" My answer is no.
A continuous state of happiness cannot be enjoyed by any human. There are no plans, no habits, no methods of living that will insure unbroken happiness.
Happiness means periods or marking posts in our journey along life"s road. These high points of bliss are enjoyed because we have to walk through the low places between times.
Continuous sunshine, continuous warm weather, continuous rest, continuous travel, continuous anything spells monotony. We must have variety.
We need the night to make us enjoy the day, winter to make us enjoy summer, clouds to make us enjoy sunshine, sorrow to make us enjoy happiness.
But, dear reader, mark this: we can be philosophical and have content, serenity and poise between the happiness periods.
When you get blue, or have dread or sorrow, or that undescribable something that makes you feel badly; when you have worry or trouble, then"s the time to get hold of your thinking machinery, and modify the shadows that come across you.
Occupation and focusing your thoughts on your blessings, these are the methods to employ.
As long as you dwell upon your imagined or your real sorrows you will be miserable and the worries will magnify like gathering clouds in April.
Take the stand of changing your thoughts to confidence, faith, and good cheer, and busy your hands with work. Think of the happiness periods you have had and know there is happiness dividends coming to you. Keep this sort of thought and with it useful occupation, and the sunshine will dispel the clouds in your thoughts like the sun dispels the April showers and brings about a more beautiful day because of the clouds and storms just pa.s.sed.
When trouble or sorrows come, sweeten your cup with sugar remembrances of joys you"ve had and joys you are to have.
Envy no one; envy breeds worry. The person you would envy has his sorrows and shadows, too; you see him only when the sunlight is on the face, you don"t see him when he is in shadowland.
No, dear ones, I nor you, nor anyone on earth can have complete, unruffled, continued happiness, but we can brace up and call our reserve will power, reason, and self-confidence to bear when we come to the marshy places along the road. We can pick our steps and get through the mire and sooner than we believe it possible we can get on the good solid ground; and as we travel, happiness will often come as a reward for our poise and patience.
My friends say, "you always seem happy," and in that saying they tell a truth, for I am happy often, very, very often and between times I make myself seem to be happy. This making myself "seem to be happy" gives me serenity, contentment, fort.i.tude, and the very "seeming" soon blossoms into a reality of the condition I seem to be in.
You can be happy often and when you are not happy, just seem to be happy anyway; it will help you much.
SELF ACCUSATION