I speak of living many years, but not getting old. I mean exactly what
I say. There is no reason why a man should be old at sixty, no, not at
seventy. I do not imply that a man should be able to do the same amount
of physical work at seventy that he can at thirty, but I do mean to
say that all his mental forces should be under his control at seventy
years of age, although he will naturally have to use them with care. A
man who has not injured his brain forces should retain them up to the
last moment of his life, but as he has not the repairing powers of the
younger man, he should be careful of the strain put upon them.
In this latter fact lies the only difference.
Having started well in your vocation, trade or profession, with your
fine brain-tools edged to their best, you may now proceed to success or
gradual failure. For, of course, just having the training and education
does not mean that everything else comes along your way. Not a bit
of it. In fact, you will find at first that the care of the working
instruments you now have will take a good lot of self-control and the
formation of certain necessary habits.
It all depends upon how you keep your brain-tools what your future
will be. Whether you neglect them once in a while so that they have to
be sharpened again, whether you leave them to rust and finally become
useless, whether you lay them aside in good condition and take them up
again in perfect order, all these matters go for success or failure. If
it is only occasionally you neglect the brain-tools, you must remember
that each new act of resharpening them leaves a less keen edge. Resting
your brain, taking time to recuperate tired cells and enjoying some
kind of sport or pleasure that is a benefit instead of an injury to
your thoughts, is necessary for every man.
These brain-tools I have been speaking of are your powers of thinking
correctly, creating, doing, and the absolute integrity which must be
retained between the impulses of the mind and the hands which respond
to these impulses. The engineer, the auto driver, the mechanic, the
draughtsman, the airman, the man who works in perilous heights while
constructing tall buildings or bridges, must have perfect harmony
throughout all his body――brain, muscles, eyes, ears. Let any one of
these senses become unconsciously dull through neglect of right living,
and the awful moment comes when an engineer sends a train to wreck with
its innocent passengers, a tender pulls a lever a tenth of a second too
soon and lets down the derrick’s load upon his fellow workers, or a
chauffeur misses the turn by a few inches and sends the auto crashing
over a precipice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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