OCR Text |
Show CULTIVATION OF OLD AGE. <br><br> There is too much education into old age. We don't recognize it as such, yet the young of both sexes on arriving "of age" are virtually taught to become old. The girl on leaving off short frocks is soon taught that it is unlady-like or improper to romp. She must cease the impetuous run of childhood and walk in a dignified manner. <br><br> Custom gives her every encouragement to become sluggish. Her dress is a fashionable system of fettering the body. When she marries, the restrictions necessary for the cultivation of old age are still more strictly enforced. She must then associate only with married women. She is received in full membership by the married clan. It is undignified longer to associate with young girls if she be so disposed. She may do so for a few years, but the unwritten laws and social mandates of the period are more subtle and powerful in their workings. A hundred unforeseen influences force her in the conventional path. Friends and relatives reprove, advise, censure or ridicule any habit of an unconventional character. She finds herself in a thicket, where, to do aught save advance in the narrow path trodden by conventionality is to encounter a myriad of thorns. So she is doomed to the company and association of those who have involuntarily made it their business of their lives to grow old, and she grows old with them, cultivates sluggishness, walks as little as possible, and gets the liver complaint. Age is developed in many ways. Through weight of domestic cares and duties. Through dress, which imprisons and fetters. Through a life five-sixths spent in the house and when not in the house shopping at the store. Through cultivating the habit of looking on the darkest side of everything. Through grown-up dignity which can never unbend into a run or a romp. Through constant repression of the playfulness which was checked when she donned the dress of the grown-up woman. People who play and are not afraid to "make fools of themselves" retain their youth much longer than Mr. Practical Sobersides. The habitudes of the mind influence the condition, and go far towards shaping the body. <br><br> The difference between the face of the man who laughs and the man who smiles proves this. Probably a corresponding difference could be found in their lungs and livers were those organs examined after death. <br><br> Ruts and grooves of occupation promote old age. The man of fifty who has spent his life in travel, and has lived in many places, and whose associations and societies have been constantly changing, will, presuming he has taken ordinary care of himself, show less signs of age than the man chained for a similar period to a desk, who moves pendulum-like from house to office, day by day, and who has made scarcely a dozen new acquaintances. <br><br> Contrast the hod-carrier of forty-five and the man of like age who has exercised moderately, lived generously but temperately, whose mind is active, broad, full of ideas and plans, and who is constantly on the move about the world. The grat? Shows market signs of premature age; the second is in his prime, full of blood, vigor and vitality. Breadth of mentality, fullness and activity of idea, frequent change of place and association, added to temperate habits of body, are preservatives of matured vigor. It was said of old, "Man shall not live by bread alone." Every new thought, every fresh idea in a balanced brain brings with it a certain healthy stimulus, which imparts new life. Philosophers, scientists and writers are longer-lived than those engaged in purely mechanical occupations. The cause of this goes beyond that limited range of deduction and conclusion called reason. But statistics will verify the substance of the assertions here made. Is it not, then, reasonable to suppose that as the range of human knowledge widens, and minds become more and more quickened with the living fire of thought, that existence up to the point of three-score and ten, and even later, may become an experience full of life, light and happiness than ever? - N. Y. Graphic. |