I have a friend who is always referring to his age. He has formed a habit of constantly dwelling upon his declining years, and keeping the picture of decrepitude in his mind. “You know, when a man gets past sixty he can’t stand what he once could,” he will say.
The idea that our energies and forces must begin to decline and the fires of ambition die out after a certain age is reached has a most pernicious influence upon the mind. We do not realize how impossible it is for us to go beyond our self-placed “dead-line” limits, to do what we really believe we cannot do.
No one is old until the interest in life is gone out of him, until his spirit becomes aged, until his heart becomes cold and unresponsive; as long as he touches life at many points he can not grow old in spirit. A man is old, no matter what his years, when he is out of touch with youth, with its ideals, its points of view, out of touch with the spirit of his times; when he has ceased to be progressive and up-to-date.
Many of the grandest characters that ever lived have retained their youthful mentality up to the very last of a long life. There was no deterioration in the mind of Marshall Field. When in his advanced years he never showed any inclination to take less pains, any cooling of ambition, any inclination to bank his fires, to drop his standards, to lower his ideals. We know that Gladstone’s mind was right in its prime at eighty.
Many a man signs his death warrant when he retires from business. Retiring from business to many means practically retiring from life, that is, from real living, because they have nothing to retire to. They have not prepared themselves for retirement to anything outside of routine business life. They have lost most of their friends in their absorption in business and their exclusive mode of living. They have never developed their social faculties, their love of art, of music, or of reading. The whole life has gone into one business channel and when out of this they are lost.
Life means little without a purpose. Once his life aim is gone man simply exists—he does not really live. A high ideal, a lofty purpose, a noble aim, whatever tends to make man look up and struggle up, tends to improve his health condition and prolong the life. The soul that aspires, other things being equal, has the longest life. Aspiration is a perpetual tonic; it stimulates all the faculties.
CHAPTER VI
MAKE YOUR LIFE COUNT
Everywhere we see men and women doing the lower, the commoner things, seemingly satisfied to do them all their lives, when they have the ability to do the higher.