THE OUTDOOR RUNWAY
After Nebuchadnezzar came in from eating grass there had taken place in that potentate a great change for the good. One of the factors in this betterment may have been the grass itself. The grass-cure has always been popular and always will be, for it is just as good for the tired mind as it is for the tired body. Nowadays every big school and every college provide a grass-cure for students who are out at elbows with their nerve sleeves, or who have not sufficient muscle to make them fit, or who are overworking or need toning up in any way. There is more and more recognition of the fact that a school course which is taken at the expense of health is not worth having. And side by side with this wholesome admission has come a great awakening in the last fifteen years to the curative value of the outdoor runway, whether that runway be a field track, energetic walking in a park or campus, or a cross country run.
Some girls—and there are more girls of this type than there are boys—put in their outdoor life as a stop-gap. It is inconceivable that this should be true, yet it is true. Apathetically the students have exercised sixty minutes, considering this minimum quite sufficient. Not a particle of zest do they reveal in the exercise taken. They do not seem to know or they do not care that the fields and woods should be full, not only of health and all that goes with it, including success, but also of the best of friends who all have their good points worthy of notice and imitation, in quick leap, cheerful voice and blithe song. What are sixty minutes in this great outdoor runway? Not a tithe of the twenty-four hours and at best only half of what the minimum should be. Exercise should be taken even if nothing else in the school life is. And I say this advisedly, for health is the basis on which not only the future of the woman's life must depend but also that of the race. Good health, the inheritance of it, its maintenance and increase, neither the girl nor her parents can ever hold as too sacred a trust. That it is a sacred trust the schools are recognizing more and more, and provisions are being made, especially in the public schools, for the defective in health as well as for the strong. The outdoor school, at first an object that attracted universal attention, is now being taken quite for granted. Foolish the girl who does not learn to take the outdoor runway for granted, too, and go out to it in high spirits to learn its wisdom, to take part in its joys and to receive its health.
It may be accepted as a new axiom—the more exercise the less fool. Strong, able muscles, steady nerves (and let us remember that nerves depend for their tone on the muscular condition), a clean skin open at all its pores and doing its eliminative work thoroughly, and clean strong vitals make up the kind of beauty within the reach of all womanhood, and the physical beauty which she should most desire. The day is coming when our ideal of what is physically perfect—not spiritually, for Christianity has carried us beyond anything that Greece ever knew—will be more like the Greek in its entirety, its emphasis upon the harmony of the whole body. The body is a mechanism to be exquisitely cared for—self-running, it is true, and yet in need of intelligent attention. Think of the care an engineer gives his engine, and it is by no manner of means so wonderfully and so intricately fashioned as these bodies of ours on which our happiness, our working ability, even our very goodness depend. Health as a safeguard to one's whole moral being is coming into more and more recognition, and not only as a safeguard but also as a cultivator of all that is best in us spiritually. There are people very ill, or permanent invalids, whose great victory it is to be among the saints of the earth, but that it is easier to be good when one is well no one will deny. Every big school has now its class or classes in corrective or medical gymnastics, in which stooping shoulders, ewe necks, curved spines, flat insteps, small waists and narrow chests are rectified as far as possible in the limited hours of the school days.
The time is coming when parents will consider it a disgrace to allow their children to be physically undeveloped. The physician, always in advance of the community for which he cares, sees how grave in moral or intellectual import physical defects may be. The educational world, alive to new messages for the reconstruction of its educational ideal, begins also to place more and more emphasis upon the physical care and development of its students—and not by any manner of means for physical reasons only but because the whole girl or the whole boy is better spiritually and mentally for having a body that is strong and well. The whole being keeps better time, just as a watch does, for having clean works. No one has the right to shut out the fresh air or the sunshine; no girl should remain undeveloped physically through lack of exercise when she could, through exercise, make herself strong. Even to abuse her feet, the important centre of many important nerves, by tight shoes, is wrong; so is it to rack her spine and upset or throw out of position all the delicate and wonderfully fashioned organs of the abdominal cavity by the wearing of high French heels. Undoubtedly, however, American motherhood and girlhood represent something more and more intelligent; indeed, in physical culture women are beginning to keep step with men, and it is upon this fact that school and college depend in their splendid efforts to make the sum of feminine vitality, despite the pressure of modern civilization, plus rather than minus.
The more exercise the less fool; and it is worth remembering that the daily exercise, the plunge into cool or clean air, as well as the plunge into water, is a wit sharpener, and will do more for a student in the long run than "digging" possibly can. Mens sana in corpore sano may be an old saying but it is still new enough to be repeated with vigour to certain people. Let us get out-of-doors and have our wits sharpened and see more, and do more, and be more! No one can permanently starve her whole body for the want of fresh air and exercise, which are the body's birthright, and expect to have a clear head or do well-balanced and helpful work in the home, or in school, or in some wage-earning career. If the girl attempt this impossibility she will be like the frog which jumped up one foot and fell back two. She will get to the bottom soon enough, the bottom of the class or the bottom of her health account, but she will never get to the top of anything. Any success, if by chance it should come to her, resting on a basis of ill health or indifference to her physical fitness for living and working, will be like the house built upon the sands. Before the girl is twenty, before she is twenty-five—the earlier the better—she should recognize this fact and begin to establish her life on the bed rock of health.
It is true, too, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that the country boy and the country girl are more resourceful than their city cousins. Out-of-doors they have had to use their wits and have not been spoiled by all the appliances of city life. Out-of-doors, too, they have made invaluable friendships with bird and squirrel and rabbit and deer, friendships whose intelligent wood-life has taught them much. Self-reliance is one of the lessons of the outdoor runway; and wisdom and inspiration come from it when they are needed. About this truth the work of the poet Wordsworth is one long poem. Again and again he writes of the perfect woman shaped by the influences of nature. Of her he says:
"Three years she grew in sun and shower;
Then Nature said, 'A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A lady of my own.
"'Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The girl in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle and restrain.
"'She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute, insensate things.
"'The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willow bend;
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the storm
Grace that shall mould the maiden's form
By silent sympathy.
"'The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face!'"
No one can afford to neglect all the spiritual influence of nature, and the only way to receive it is to go to nature. Purity of mind, a clean conception of God's creative plan, a more active intellectual life are all there for the girl who will seek them. She cannot afford not to go back to nature for these helps, for every woman is in some sense a burden bearer, and she must needs know all she can of what life means in order to bear these burdens well.
There are various kinds of outdoor life, some one of which is within reach of every human being, even if they are cripples. Probably most girls when the outdoor life of school and college is spoken of think that athletics is meant. That is one part of the outdoor runway, and since it is provided in every school, and insisted upon, but little about it need be said. It is doing its work with more and more inspiration, as the response to its ideals comes in. And it does something more in every well-equipped school than merely make a girl use her legs and arms: it gives her a large, sane ideal of health and provides her with the means of keeping well. There is no more useful profession for the woman seeking one that is useful as well as remunerative than physical culture.
There is another aspect of the outdoor runway of which less is said. I mean gardening, or the care of live stock of some kind, or bee culture. This is practical remunerative work which for the girl living at home and going to school should serve famously as a grass-cure; it would keep her out-of-doors with profit to both her health and her purse. And then there is another kind of grass-cure: the outdoor life out-of-doors, to be taken in long country walks, in fishing expeditions, in picnics, in camping or wherever roads, hills, meadows and brooks lead. Finally, there is the outdoor life indoors. This life insists upon windows open to the air and open to the sunshine, and this life every one of us may have all the time.