Health Is The Most Natural Thing In The World

( Originally Published 1908 )

Health and Habit

IF you have health, you probably will be happy; and if you have health and happiness, you will have all the wealth you need even if not all you want.

Health is the most natural thing in the world.

It is natural to be healthy because we are a part of Nature—we are Nature. Nature is trying hard to keep us well, because she needs us in her business.

Nature needs man so he will be useful to other men.

The rewards of life are for service.

And the penalties of life are for selfishness.

Human service is the highest form of self-interest for the person who serves.

We preserve our sanity only as we forget self in service.

To center on one's self, and forget our relationship to society is to summon misery, and misery means disease.

Unhappiness is an irritant. It affects the heart-beats or circulation first; then the digestion, and the person is ripe for two hundred and nineteen Nothing you can take out of a bottle or that you can rub on, will remove the cause of misery.

" Medicine is only palliative," says Dr. Weir Mitchell, "for back of disease lies the cause, and this cause no drug can reach. "

"I've got a cold in my head," said the man to the wise doctor.

And the doctor replied, "Doubtless, for that is the only place where the microbe abides. "

People who dread disease and fear disease have disease.

The recipe for good health is this: Forget it.

What we call diseases are merely symptoms of mental conditions.

Our bodies are automatic, and thinking about your digestion does not aid you. Rather it hinders, since the process of thinking, especially anxious thinking, robs the stomach of its blood, and transfers it to the head.

If you are worried enough, digestion will stop absolutely. The moral is obvious : Don't Worry.

" This horse is all right, unless he gets scared, " said a horseback rider to me, the other day.

And I answered, "So am I!"

In public speaking I have often noticed that when I am anxious to make a big speech, I grow fearful about my voice, and begin to distrust my memory. The result is that I have to push that speech ahead of me for the whole blessed hour and a half, and am conscious of my feet and aware of my hands all the time.

The result is a strictly Class B oratorical effort.

That is to say, it was an effort and not a pleasure for either the speaker or the audience. For a speaker supplies the mood for the audience.

If the speaker is happy, the audience is, also.

And as before hinted, we are only happy when we forget ourselves and do not know whether we are happy or not.

Those rare times when I make a big impression upon my auditors are when I go upon the stage with a certain amount of indifference, simply taking care not to have over-eaten. Then I start in slowly, and soon the thoughts are coming along, just as fast as I can use them. The air is full of reasons, and all I have to do is to reach up and pick the ones I want.

With good health it is the same—just a few plain rules, and the whole matter is automatic and self-lubricating. Health is a habit.

We are ruled by habit.

There are three habits which, with but one condition added, will give you everything in the world worth having, and beyond which the imagination of man cannot conjure forth a single addition or improvement. These habits are :

THE WORK HABIT.

THE HEALTH HABIT.

THE STUDY HABIT.

If you are a man and have these habits, and also have the love of a woman who has these same habits, you are in Paradise now and here, and so is she.

Health, Books and Work, with Love added, are a solace for all the stings and arrows of outrageous fortune—a defense 'gainst all the storms that blow, for through their use you transmute sadness into mirth, trouble into ballast, pain into joy.

Do you say that religion is still needed ?

Then I answer that Work, Study, Health and Love constitute religion. Moreover, any religion that leaves out any one of these four ingredients is not religion, but fetich.

And yet most formal religions have pronounced the love of man for woman and woman for man an evil thing.

They have proclaimed labor a curse.

They have said that sickness was sent from God; and they have whipped and scorned the human body as something despicable, and thus have placed a handicap on health, and made the doctor a necessity.

And they have said that mental attainment was a vain and frivolous thing, and that our reason was a lure to lead us on to the eternal loss of our soul's salvation.

Now, we deny it all, and again proclaim that these will bring you all the good there is Health, Work, Study—Love!

Work means safety for yourself and service to mankind. Health means much happiness and potential power. Study means knowledge, But Love must be a matter of reciprocity, not a one-sided affair. "I love you because you love the things that I love. "

A man who marries a woman in order to educate her, falls a victim to the same fallacy that the woman does who marries a man expecting to reform him.

If you marry a woman who is not on your mental wire, you 'll either go down to her level or you will live in a water-tight compartment and go to purgatory through mental asphyxiation.

Choose this day the habits you would have rule over you.