The Victorious Attitude

by Orison Swett Marden

If you do not wish to grow old, quit thinking and acting as if you were aging. Instead of walking with drooped shoulders and with a slow, dragging gait, straighten up and put elasticity into your steps. Do not walk like an old man whose energies are waning, whose youthful fires are spent. Step with the springiness of a young man full of life, spirit and vigor. The body is not old until the mind gives its consent. Stop thinking of yourself as an old man or an old woman. Cease manifesting symptoms of decrepitude. Remember that the impression you make upon others will react on yourself. If other people get the idea that you are going down hill physically and mentally, you will have all the more to overcome in your effort to change their convictions.

When we are ambitious to obtain a certain thing, and our hearts are set on it, we strive for it, we contact with it mentally and through our thoughts we become vitally related to it. We establish a connection with the coveted object. In other words, we do everything in our power to obtain it; and the mental effort is a real force which tends to match our dream with its realization.

An up-to-date modern woman is a good example of what I mean. She does not act like an old lady, and does not put on an old lady's garb after she has passed the half-century milestone. We do not see the old lady's cap, the old lady's gown of the past any more. Women getting along in years nowadays dress more youthfully and appear younger than their grandmothers did at the same age. They do everything to make themselves appear young. Men are much more likely than women to grow careless in regard to personal appearance as they grow older. They wear their hair longer, they let their beard grow, they stoop their shoulders, drag their feet when they walk, and begin to neglect their dress. They are not as careful in any respect to retain their youthful appearance as women, who resort to all sorts of expedients to ward off signs of age and to retain their attractiveness.

The habit of growing old must be combated as we combat any other vicious habit, by reversing the processes by which it is formed. Instead of surrendering and giving up to old age convictions and fears, stoutly deny them and affirm the opposite. When the suggestion comes to you that your powers are waning, that you cannot do what you once did, prove its falsity by exercising the faculties which you think are weakening. Giving up is only to surrender to age.

We tend to find what we look for in this world, and if, as we advance in years, we are always looking for signs of old age we will find them. If you are constantly on the alert for symptoms of failing faculties, you will discover plenty of them; and the great danger of this is that we are apt to take our unfortunate moods for permanent symptoms. That is, some day perhaps you cannot think as clearly, you cannot concentrate your mind as well, you do not remember as readily as you did the day before, and you immediately jump to the conclusion that a man of your age must begin to fail, cannot expect as much of himself as when he was younger. In other words, a person whose mind is concentrated upon his aging processes is inclined to draw a wrong conclusion from his temporary moods and feelings, mistaking them for permanent conditions.

The majority of people who are showing the signs of premature aging are suffering from chronic thought poison, that is, the chronic old age poison. From the cradle they have heard old age talk, the reiteration of the old age belief that when a person reached about such an age he would then naturally begin to let up, to prepare for the end. And so instead of fighting off age by holding the eternal youth thought and the vigor thought they have held the thoughts of weakness and declining powers. When they happen to forget something, they say their memory is beginning to go back on them, their sight will soon begin to fail, and they go on anticipating signs of decline and decrepitude until the old age visualization is built into the very structure of their bodies.

Instead of forming the habit of looking for signs of age form the habit of looking for signs of youth. Form the habit of thinking of your body as robust and supple and your brain as strong and active. Never allow yourself to think that you are on the decline, that your faculties are on the wane, that they are not as sharp as they used to be and that you cannot think as well, because your cells are becoming old and hard. He ages who thinks he ages. He keeps young who believes he is young.

We get a good hint of the power of mental influence in the marvelous way in which many of our actresses and grand-opera singers retain their youthfulness, because they feel that it is imperative that they should do so. Had Sara Bernhardt, Adelina Patti, Lily Lehmann, Madame Schumann-Heink, Lillian Russell, and scores of other actresses and singers pursued any other vocation they would undoubtedly have been at least ten, perhaps twenty years older in appearance than they are.

There are too many exceptions to the race belief that man's powers begin to wane at fifty, sixty or seventy to allow oneself to be influenced by it. We really ought to do our best work after fifty. If the brain is kept active, fresh and young, and the brain cells are not ruined by a vicious life, worry, fear, selfishness, or by disease induced by wrong living or thinking, the mind will constantly increase in vigor and power. Men and women whose faculties are sharp and whose minds are keen and vigorous at ninety, and even at a hundred, prove this. I know a number of men in their seventies and eighties who are as sturdy and vigorous physically and mentally to-day as they were twenty years ago. Only recently I was talking with a business man who broke down at forty from over strain but who is now, in his eightieth year, more buoyant and elastic in mind and body than many men at fifty. This man does not believe in growing old because he knows that ten years ago he did not have a bit of the cell material in his body that he has to-day. "Why should I stamp these new body cells with four score years," he says, "when not a single one of them may be a quarter of that age?"

Many of us do not realize the biological fact that Nature herself bestows upon us the power of perpetual renewal. There is not a cell in our bodies that can possibly become very old, because all of them are frequently renewed. Physiologists tell us that the tissue cells of some muscles are renewed every few months. Some authorities estimate that eighty or ninety per cent. of all the cells in the body of a person of ordinary activity are entirely renewed within a couple of years.