The Victorious Attitude

by Orison Swett Marden

A short time ago I was talking with a remarkable man of sixty about growing old. The thought of the inevitableness of the aging processes appalled him. No matter, he declared, what efforts he might make to avert or postpone the decrepitude of age there would come a period of diminishing returns, and though he might fight against it he would ever after be on the decline of life, going irrevocably toward the sunset, ever nearer and nearer to the time when he should be useless. "The conviction that every moment, every hour, every day takes me so much nearer to that hole in the ground from which no power in Heaven or earth can help us to escape is ever present in my mind," he said. "This progressive, ever-active retrogression is monstrous. This inevitably decrepit old age staring me in the face is robbing me of happiness, paralyzing my efforts and discouraging my ambition."

"But why do you dwell on those things that terrify you?" I asked. "Why do you harbor such old age thoughts? Why are you visualizing decrepitude, the dulling and weakening of your mental faculties? If you have such a horror of the decrepitude, the loss of memory, the failing eyesight, the hesitating step, and the general deterioration which you believe accompany old age, why don't you get away from these terrifying thoughts, put them out of your mind instead of dwelling on them? Don't you know that what you concentrate on, what you fear, the pictures that so terrify you, are creating the very conditions which you would give anything to escape? If you really wish to stay the old age processes you must change your thoughts. Erase everything that has to do with age from your mind. Visualize youthful conditions. Say to yourself, "God is my life. I cannot grow old in spirit, and that is the only old age to fear. As long as my spirit is youthful; as long as the boy in me lives, I cannot age."

The great trouble with those who are getting along in years is that they put themselves outside of the things that would keep them young. Most people after fifty begin to shun children and youth generally. They feel that it is not "becoming to their years" to act as they did when younger, and day by day they gradually fall more and more into old age ways and habits.

We build into our lives the picture patterns which we hold in our minds. This is a mental law. When you have reached the time at which most people show traces of their age you imagine that you must do the same. You begin to think you have probably done your best work, and that your powers must henceforth decline. You imagine your faculties are deteriorating, that they are not quite so sharp as they once were; that you cannot endure quite so much, and that you ought to begin to let up a little; to take less exercise, to do less work, to take life a little easier.

The moment you allow yourself to think your powers are beginning to decline they will do so, and your appearance and bodily conditions will follow your convictions. If you hold the thought that your ambition is sagging, that your faculties are deteriorating, you will be convinced that younger men have the advantage of you, and, voluntarily, at first, you will begin to take a back seat, figuratively speaking, behind the younger men. Once you do this you are doomed to be pushed farther and farther to the rear. You will be taken at your own valuation. Having made a confession of age, acknowledged in thought and act that, in so far as work and productive returns are concerned, you are no longer the equal of young men, they will naturally be preferred before you.

If people who have aged prematurely could only analyze the influences which have robbed them of their birthright of youth they would find that most of them were a false conviction that they must grow old at about such a time, needless worry,—all worry is needless,—silly anxiety, which often comes from vanity, jealousy and the indulgence of such passions as excessive temper, revenge, and all sorts of unhealthy thinking. If they could only eliminate these influences from their lives, they would take a great leap back toward youthfulness. If it were possible to erase all of the scars and wrinkles, all the effects of our aging thoughts, aging emotions, moods and passions, many of us would be so transformed, so rejuvenated that our friends would scarcely know us. The aging thoughts and moods and passions make old men and women of most of us in middle life.

The laws of renewal, of rejuvenation are always operating in us, and will be effective if we do not neutralize them by wrong thinking. The chemical changes caused in the blood and other secretions by worry, fear, the operation of the explosive passions, or by any depressing mental disturbance, will put the aging processes in action.

Whatever we establish as a fixed conviction in our lives we transmit to our children, and this conviction gathers cumulative force all the way down the centuries. Every child in Christian countries is born with the race belief that three score years or three score years and ten is a sort of measure of the limit to human life. This has crystallized into a race belief, and we begin to prepare for the end much in advance of the period fixed. As long as we hold this belief we cannot bar out of our minds the consequent suggestion that when we pass the half century limit our powers begin to decline. The very idea that we have reached our limit of growth, that any hope of further progress must be abandoned, tends to etch the old age picture and conviction deeper and deeper in our minds, and of course the creative processes can only reproduce the pattern given them.

Some men cross the zenith line, from which they believe they must henceforth go down-hill, a quarter of a century or more earlier than others, because we cross this line of demarcation mentally first, cross it when we are convinced that we have passed the maximum of our producing power and have reached the period of diminishing returns.

Many people have what they are pleased to call a premonition that they will not live beyond a certain age, and that becomes a focus toward which the whole life points. They begin to prepare for the end. Their conviction that they are to die at a certain time largely determines the limitation of their years.