How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions Part 14

3. HOW TO SIT

Badly as people stand, they sit possibly worse. Most people sit in the most unhealthful as well as in the most ungraceful way. Generally there is a complete "slumping" of the chest, the spine is brought into a wide, single curve instead of its counterpoise curves.

All the exercises from the very first, have a bearing upon the establishment of the normal conditions of the spine. If the exercises are well practiced, especially the elevation and expansion of the chest, the spine is strengthened and its normally proportioned curves are established.

Bad positions in sitting are extremely common. Book-keepers, editors, seamstresses and children in school need careful attention. Special exercises should be given, such as the "harmonious expansion of the chest" in sitting and the use of the arms to develop the uprightness of the torso.

Bad positions in sitting are often due to a false sense of rest. Muscles not acting harmoniously tend to completely collapse. Many people sit without true rest, and are continually s.h.i.+fting their position in a vain search for rest.

What is rest? The chief rest comes through the alternation of activity and pa.s.sivity, that is, through rhythm. Pa.s.sivity alternating with activity brings rest to the human heart and is the best mode of rest.

Rest also results from normal functioning. A person can sit or stand in true poise, giving freedom to breathing, and be able to rest much more truly than in an unnatural, abnormal, collapsed condition.

This can be well ill.u.s.trated by the fact that when a person starts out to walk with the chest slumped, the head hung down and with all the vital organs cramped, he comes back more weary than rested.

In walking we should, as has been shown, keep the chest well expanded, the body elevated, co-ordinating all the normal relations of parts. If we walk in this way it tends to rest rather than to weary us.

Therefore stand sympathetically expanded and easily tall. Walk in the same way and sit in the same way. Let there be a certain exhilaration and a sense of satisfaction.

4. HOW TO LIE DOWN

Dr. Lyman Beecher said that one should always a.s.sume a horizontal posture in the middle of the day. The heart, he said, had less difficult work to pump the blood horizontally than vertically.

Henry Ward Beecher attributed his power to do a great deal more work than ordinary men to this habit of his life of always resting in the middle of the day.

He justified his habit by quoting from his father, using even his father's antique p.r.o.nunciation of "poster."

There is no doubt truth in this. To one very active and who performs a great deal of work it brings a variety of positions and greater rhythm.

It rests the vital organs. It brings a harmonious repose and relation of parts.

Even in lying down, we find abnormal conditions. Some men cramp and constrict themselves. The chest is allowed to collapse and the whole body tends to be drawn together. Grief or any negative emotion of feeling or condition destructive to health tends to act in this way.

People, therefore, should lie down properly. They should lie down, as has been said, sympathetically and expansively long. They should directly manifest courage rather than shrinking, joy rather than sadness, with thankful animation rather than in a despairing state of mind. By the expression of joy and courage and peaceful repose and with a deep sense of the acceptance and realization of the good of life lying down will mean more. Express this in the body by normal position, by expansion, no matter what att.i.tude the body may occupy. Man, whether he chooses or not, always expresses the state of his mind in the action of his body. And by cultivating the right mood and expressing the right feeling and so exercising the parts of his body as to express normally and more adequately that mood, men will develop not only health, strength and long life; but will also develop a n.o.bler and stronger personality and more heroic and courageous endurance.

The exercises, accordingly, should be applied to the simplest movements of every-day life. They must not be taken as something separate from life, but as an essential part of it, as necessary to life as a smile is to the face.

VII

WORK AND PLAY

"Blessed," says Carlyle, "is the man who has found his work. Let him seek no other blessing."

A man out of work is one of the saddest of all sights. There possibly is a sadder one, the man who has lost the power to play. The child in whom the spirit of play has been crushed out is saddest of all.

Work is natural. One who does not love to work is greatly to be pitied.

Fortunately, such people are rare. When a man finds his work and becomes actively occupied with it he is happy. He, however, often overdoes it and the difficulty is not to work but to play.

Usually it is thought that there is antagonism between work and play. On the contrary, they are more alike than most people think.

According to William Morris, "Art is the spirit of play put into our work." The union of work and play is absolutely necessary to human nature.

By work we generally mean something that comes as a duty, something which we are compelled to do or something which we must do from necessity in order to win a livelihood.

Play is usually regarded as something that is pure enjoyment and spontaneous. A recent cartoon pictured a boy complaining because his mother had asked him to carry a small rug up to the top of the house, then portrayed the same boy, after a ten-mile trudge, climbing a steep hill with a load of golf sticks, the perspiration streaming down his face, saying, "This is fine!"

The same task may therefore be regarded as work or play according to the point of view. The difference is the degree of enjoyment, the att.i.tude or feeling toward the thing to be done.

We can control our attention, we can look for interesting things in almost any effort. In either work or play we require a rhythmic alternation between enjoyment and resolute endeavor.

The principles advocated in this book and its companion, "The Smile,"

should prepare a man for the work and the play of life. Exercises taken at any time should serve as a remedy for the evil effects of hard work of any kind.

The exercises give the best preparation for work and because many of them are taken lying down they do not exhaust but acc.u.mulate energy.

They also stimulate and develop a harmony and activity of man's whole being.

The shortest and best answer that can be made to the question "How to work" is, to work rhythmically. This is the way Nature works. There is action and reaction.

The law of rhythm, which has already been explained, must be obeyed in our every-day tasks. It applies to every step we take.

One of the best results of these exercises is that they develop a sense of rhythm.

There are many violations of rhythm. One is continuing along one line too long. Work can be so arranged as to be varied. We can work at one thing several hours and then we can deliberately drop it until the next day and take up some other phase of work.

Without rhythm, work becomes drudgery. A more specific violation of rhythm is a failure to relax and to use force only when needed.

The greatest effect of force comes through action and reaction.

Sometimes a man uses unnecessary parts and uses them continually. That, of course, will cause weariness.

There are hundreds of questions regarding such discussions in as many books in our day. Mr. Nathaniel J. Fowler, Jr., in "The Boy," a careful book which is a treasure house of information, has gathered answers to leading questions from two hundred and eighty-three prominent men. Many of these, in fact, most of them, advise a boy, when he is not satisfied with his work and is pretty sure that he is not adapted to it, to change his occupation.

It is a difficult point upon which to give advice, but other things being equal, work should be enjoyed. When not enjoyed there should be a serious study of the man himself, a study of his att.i.tude toward life, a study of his possibilities, a study of his opportunities, and also a study of what he is best fitted for, and an endeavor to find this.

It is surprising, however, how far men can adapt themselves, even change their very nature in accomplis.h.i.+ng a work which is laid upon them as a duty. One of the greatest artists of New England took care of his brothers and sisters and his father's farm, at a crisis, and kept a little shed outside the house where he painted at odd moments. He had an avocation as well as a vocation. He gave up his trip to study in Europe as he wished to study; he did a vast amount of work which was regarded by many as drudgery, and he was compelled to study his art only at odd moments. Despite all this, George Fuller became one of the most ill.u.s.trious and original of American artists. Today his pictures are in all the leading museums, and command a high price.

What is drudgery? Dr. James Freeman Clark defined it as "work without imagination." Anything can be made drudgery. A man can study art, or sing, paint pictures, edit newspapers, or write books and make his work drudgery. Drudgery is working perfunctorily. It is work without aspiration, work without an ideal.

No man can do anything well in life, without an ideal. If a man undertakes a certain work he must begin it by awakening and realizing the importance of that work in the world's life. He must form a definite ideal of the best possible way of doing that work and of its relation to the world.

In short, no man can accomplish anything in a negative, indifferent att.i.tude toward his work. He must look upon it from the side of its importance, the side of its beauty, the side that is interesting to him, the side that shows its influence and helpfulness toward the world.

Play, to the little child--and also to the hard working man--is more serious than work. When work begins to be perfunctory, play is the only remedy. In such a case a man is in a dangerous rut and must adopt a new rhythm.

"All work, and no play, makes Jack," or any other donkey, "a dull boy."