Article April 17, 1902 Issue

You are always as Young as you Feel

Success

People grow old by thinking themselves old. When they reach the age of forty, fifty, or sixty, they imagine that they look like others of the same age, and that they soon will be useless, unfit for work, and unable to perform their wonted duties. As surely as they think this, it will come true, for thought is creative. How many of us can say, with Job, "The thing which I greatly feared is come upon me".

The time will come when children will not be allowed to celebrate their birthdays; when they will know that, by thinking they will cease to grow old when they cease to believe in old age. The body is built up of beliefs, and convictions are stamped upon every fibre of our beings. What we believe, what we think, that we are; so people who remain young in spirit never grow old.

Not one of a hundred students, of whom the writer was one, under Oliver Wendell Holmes, at Harvard, ever thought of him as an old man, although he had then passed his eightieth birthday. His spirit was so young, and he was so buoyant, so fresh and full of life that we always thought of him as one of ourselves. His vivacity and joyousness were contagious. You could not be in his presence five minutes without feeling brighter and better for it. The genial doctor never practised medicine, yet he did more to relieve human suffering than many practising physicians His presence was a tonic; it was a perpetual delight to be near him.—Success.

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