Age will never succeed in retaining a youthful appearance and mentality until people make up their minds not to let the years count, — until they cease to make the body old by the constant suggestions of the mind. We begin to sow the seed-thoughts of age in youth. We look forward to being old at forty-five, and to going downhill at fifty.
The very act of preparing for old age hastens it. As Job said, "The thing I feared most has come upon me." People who prepare for a thing and look for it, anticipating, fearing, dreading it in their daily lives, usually get it.
There is a great deal in the association of ideas. Never for a moment allow yourself to think that you are too old to do this or that, for your thoughts and convictions will very soon outpicture themselves in a wrinkled face and a prematurely old expression. There is nothing better established than the philosophy that we are what we think, and that we become like our thoughts.
Never smother the impulse to act in a youthful manner because you think you are too old. Recently, at a family gathering, the boys were trying to get their father, past sixty, to play with them. “Oh, go away, go away!” he said; “I am too old for that.” But the mother entered into their sports, apparently with just as much enthusiasm and real delight as if she were only their age. The youthful spirit shone in her eyes and manifested itself in every movement Her frolic with the boys explains why she looks so much younger than her husband, in spite of the very slight difference in their years.
Be always as young as you feel, and keep young by associating with young people and taking an interest in their interests, hopes, plans, and amusements. The vitality of youth is contagious.
When questioned as to the secret of his marvelous youthfulness, in his eightieth year, Oliver Wendell Holmes replied that it was due chiefly "to a cheerful disposition and invariable contentment in every period of my life with what I was. I never felt the pangs of ambition. . . . It is restlessness, ambition, discontent and disquietude that makes us grow old prematurely by carving wrinkles on our faces. Wrinkles do not appear on faces that have constantly smiled. Smiling is the best possible massage. Contentment is the fountain of youth."
We need to practise the contentment extolled by the genial doctor, which is not the contentment of inertness, but the freeing ourselves from entangling vanities, petty cares, worries, and anxieties, which hamper us in our real life-work. The sort of ambition he condemns is that in which egotism and vanity figure most conspicuously, and in which notoriety, the praise and admiration of the world, wealth, and personal aggrandizement are the objects sought, rather than the power to be of use in the world, to be a leader in the service of humanity, and to be the noblest, best, and most efficient worker that one can be. It is the useless complexities in which vanity and unworthy ambition entangle us that wear away life and make so many Americans old men and women at forty. The simple life can be the fullest, noblest, and most useful.
If you would live long, love your work and continue doing it. Don't lay it down at fifty, because you think your powers are on the wane, or that you need a rest. Take a vacation whenever you require it, but don't give up your work. There is life, — there is youth in it. "I cannot grow old," says a noted actress, "because I love my art. I spend my life absorbed in it. I am never bored.