How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its SatisfactionsCurry, S. S. (Samuel Silas)
Science
How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions
Curry, S. S. (Samuel Silas)
Hygiene; Physical education and training
Arts are given us rather for avocations, for our enjoyment, as a test of
our ability to appreciate the different points of view. Each art, as I
have often tried to say, expresses something that no other art can say,
and he is a cultivated human being who can read all the arts and enjoy
them. The aim of art is to guide our energies in higher directions, and
to stimulate our ideals. Art develops attention and trains us to become
interested in a great variety of directions.
As a proof of this observe the great beauty of nature. We are stirred
to go out of doors, to go into the woods and note the beautiful scene
and the music of the pines that calls us. Nature everywhere seems at
play, seems to invite men to come out into her unlimited playground, the
playground of universal principles and fullness of life.
The poet, Schiller, explained all art as being derived from the play
instinct. It has been said that play is the overflow of life. Life,
love, joy, all noble ideals, must awaken spontaneity or they will not
grow. All parts of man's nature must have expression and not be
repressed. Play is given to stimulate and to express the spontaneous in
us, to manifest emotion and imagination and a sense of freedom. Freedom
is a necessity of all unfoldment. Even the flower must bloom
spontaneously from the energy within. The sun that calls forth the
leaves on all the trees does so by warming the roots in the tree and
bringing the gentle south winds which fan the waving branches into
activity and cause the unfolding buds to be filled with spontaneous
life.
The whole world is full of joy and love. It is human ambition and
jealousies that bring the hindrances.
The rhythmic alternation and the necessary relation of work and play to
each other can be seen in the very constitution of man. Play alone may
develop obedience to lower impulses; while work alone tends to repress
the higher aspirations and spontaneous energies.
Even a man's health and strength as well as success depend upon the
rhythmic alternation of work and play.
While reading over the copy for this book for the last time, when in
that agonizing state which some writers know, undecided whether to throw
it into the fire or send it to the printers, I read at the suggestion of
a friend, Eleanor H. Porter's little book, "Pollyanna." That simple,
wholesome story has given me courage. The fundamental lesson in it is
that we should find always something about which to be glad, no matter
how severe the trial or how disappointing the event.
Goethe gave as rules for a life of culture:--"Every day see some
beautiful picture, hear some beautiful piece of music, read some
beautiful poem." These might develop culture in a narrow sense, but to
broaden and deepen our lives we need every day to see something
beautiful in nature, and in the lives and characters of our fellow
beings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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