The ability to hold mentally the picture of youth in all its glory, vivacity and splendor has a powerful influence in restraining the old age processes.
Old age begins in the heart. When the heart grows cold the skin grows old, and the appearances of age impress themselves on the body. The mind becomes blighted, the ideals blurred, and the juices of life congealed.
Many people look forward to old age as a time when, as a recent writer puts it, you have "a feeling that no one wants you, that all those you have borne and brought up have long passed out onto roads where you cannot follow, that even the thought-life of the world streams by so fast that you lie up in a backwater, feebly, blindly groping for the full of the water, and always pushed gently, hopelessly back."
There is such a thing as an old age of this kind, but not for those who face life in the right way. Such a pathetic, such a tragic ending is not for those who love and are loved, because they keep their hearts open to the joys and sorrows of life; who maintain a sympathetic interest in their fellow-beings and in the progress and uplift of the world; who keep their faculties sharpened by use, and whose minds are constantly reaching out, broadening and growing, in the love and service of humanity. A dismal, useless old age is only for those who have not learned how to live.
Growth in knowledge and wisdom should be the only indication of our added years. Professor Metchnikoff, the greatest authority on age, believes that it is possible to prolong life, with its maximum of vigor and freshness, until the end of its normal cycle, when the individual will gratefully welcome what will be a perfectly happy release. At this point he claims that the instinct of death will supplant the instinct of life, when the bodily mechanism approaches the natural end of normal exhaustion. He believes that men should live and maintain their usefulness for at least one hundred and twenty years.
The author of "Philosophy of Longevity" tells us that man can live to be two hundred years old. Jean Finot says: "Speaking physiologically, the human body possesses peerless solidity. Not one of the machines invented by man could resist for a single year the incessant taxes which we impose upon ours. Yet it continues to perform its functions notwithstanding."
What we have a horror of is the premature death of the faculties, the cutting off of power, opportunity, the decay of the body many years before the close of the life on earth. We shudder at the giving up of a large part of life that has potency of work, of action and of happiness. This horror of senility increases, because life continually grows more interesting. There never was a time when it seemed so precious, so full of possibilities, when there was so much to live for, as in this glorious present. There never was a time when it seemed so hard to be forced out of the life race. We are on the eve of a new and marvelous era, and the whole race is on the tiptoe of expectancy. Never before was the thought of old age as represented by decay and enforced inactivity so repugnant to man.
But why should any one look forward to such a period? It is just this looking forward, the anticipating and dreading the coming of old age, that makes us old, senile, useless.
The creative forces inside of us build on our suggestions, on our thought models, and if we constantly thrust into our consciousness old age thoughts and pictures of decrepitude, of declining faculties, these thoughts and pictures will be reproduced in the body.
A few years ago a young man "died of old age" in a New York hospital. After an autopsy the surgeons said that while the man was in reality only twenty-three years old he was internally eighty! If you have arrived at an age which you accept as a starting point for physical deterioration, your body will sympathize with your conviction. Your walk, your gait, your expression, your general appearance, and even your acts will all fall into line with your mental attitude.