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Chapter 21 — The Sculptor and the Clay

When you step into your office on Monday morning, no doubt you have dreams of wonderful achievement. Your step is firm, your brain is clear and you have carefully thought out just WHAT you will do and HOW you will accomplish big things in your business. Perhaps the very plans you have in mind will influence your whole business career, and you have visions of the dollars that will be yours rolling into your bank account.

But do these dreams come true?

Are you always able to put through what you had planned to do — does your day’s work have the snap and power you imagined it would have? Are you ever forced to admit that your dreams of big accomplishment are often shattered because of “fagged nerves” and lack of energy, because you have not the “pep”?

How easy it is to think back and see how success was in your grasp if only you had felt equal to that extra bit of effort, if only you had had the “pep,” the energy to reach out and take it. The great men of the world have been well men, strong men. Sickness and hesitancy go hand in hand. Sickness means weakness, querulous ness, lack of faith, and lack of confidence in oneself and in others.

But there is no real reason for sickness or weakness, and there is no reason why you should remain weak or sick if you are so afflicted now.

Remember the story of the sculptor Pygmalion? How he made a statue of marble so beautiful that every woman who saw it envied it? So perfect was it that he fell in love with it himself, hung it with flowers and jewels, spent day after day in rapt admiration of it, until finally the gods took pity upon him and breathed into it the breath of life.

There is more than Pagan mythology to that story. There is this much truth in it — that any man can set before his mind’s eye the image of the figure he himself would like to be, and then breathe the breath of life into it merely by keeping that image before his subconscious mind as the model on which to do its daily building.

For health and strength are natural. It is ill health and weakness that are unnatural. Your body was meant to be lithe, supple, muscular, and full of red-blooded energy and vitality. A clear brain, a powerful heart, a massive chest, wrists and arms of steel — all these were meant for you — all these you can have if you will but know, and feel, and think aright.

Just take stock of yourself for a moment. Are your muscles tough, springy and full of vim? Do they do all you ask of them — and then beg for more? Can you eat a good meal — and forget it?

If you can’t, it’s your own fault. You can have a body alive with vitality, a skin smooth and fine of texture, muscles supple and virile. You can be the man you have always dreamed of being, without arduous dieting, without tiresome series of exercises, merely by following the simple rules herein laid down.

For what is it that builds up the muscles, puts energy and vitality into your system, gives you the pep and vigor of youth? Is it exercise? Then why is it that so many day laborers are poor, weak, anemic creatures, forced to lay off from one to three months every year on account of sickness? They get plenty of exercise and fresh air. Why is it that so many athletes die of tuberculosis or of weak hearts? They get the most scientific exercise year in and year out.

Just the other day I read of the sudden death of Martin A. Delaney, the famous trainer, known all over the country as a physical director. He taught thousands how to be strong, but “Athletic Heart” killed him at 55. Passersby saw him running for a car, then suddenly topple over dead.

“Exercise as a panacea for all human ills is dangerously overrated,” Dr. Charles M. Wharton, in charge of health and physical education at the University of Pennsylvania, said today (March 20, 1926), according to an Associated Press dispatch.

Dr. Wharton, who has been a trainer of men for thirty years and was an all-American guard on the Pennsylvania football team in 1895 and 1896, declared the search for the fountain of youth by exercise and diet has been commercialized to a point of hysteria.

“Someone should cry a halt against this wild scramble for health by Unnatural means,” said Dr. Wharton. “This indiscriminate adoption of severe physical training destroys the health of more people than it improves.”

Dr. Wharton said he was appalled by the amount of physical defects and weaknesses developed by overindulgence in athletics by students in preparatory schools.

“I know I am presenting an unpopular viewpoint, and it may sound strange coming from a physical director.

“In gymnasium work at the University of Pennsylvania we try to place our young men in sports which they will enjoy, and thus get a physical stimulation from relaxed play.”

Is it diet? Then why is it that so many people you know, who have been dieting for years, are still such poor, flabby creatures? Doesn’t it always work, or is it merely a matter of guess-work-and those were the cases where no one happened to guess right? Why is it that doctors disagree so on what is the correct diet? For years we have been taught to forswear too much meat. For years we have been told that it causes rheumatism and gout and hardening of the arteries — and a dozen or more other ailments.

Now comes Dr. Woods Hutchinson — a noted authority, quoted the world over — and says: “All the silly old prejudice against meat, that it heated the blood (whatever that means) and produced uric acid to excess, hardened the arteries, inflamed the kidneys, caused rheumatism, etc., has now been proved to be pure fairy tales, utterly without foundation in scientific fact.

“Red meats have nothing whatever to do with causing gout and rheumatism, because neither of these diseases is due to foods or drinks of any sort, but solely to what we call local infections. Little pockets of pus (matter) full of robber germs — mostly streptococci — around the roots of our teeth, in the pouches of our tonsils, in the nasal passages and sinuses of our foreheads and faces opening into them;... Our belief now is: ‘No pockets of pus, no rheumatism or gout.’ Food of any kind has absolutely nothing to do with the case.

“On the other hand, the very worst cases on record in all medical history of hardening and turning to lime (calcification) of the arteries all over the body, and in the kidneys and intestines particularly, have been found in Trappist and certain orders of Oriental monks who live almost exclusively upon starch and — that is, peas, beans, and lentils, and abstain from meat entirely.”

Then what is right? Is it the combination of diet and exercise? But surely the patients in sanitariums and similar institutions would have every chance to get just the right combination, yet how often you see them come out little, if any, better off than when they went in.

No. None of these is the answer. As a matter of fact, the principal good of either diet or exercise is that it keeps before the patient’s mind the RESULT he is working for, and in that way tends to impress it upon his subconscious mind. That is why physical culturists always urge you to exercise in front of a mirror. If results are achieved, it is MIND that achieves them — not the movements you go through or the particular kind of food you eat.