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OMG; HE IS TALKING/ABOUT ME!
By Jim “Gymbeaux” Brown, August 10, 2017
I
have become a reader/lover of all things written by Orison Swett Marden who wrote
his books in the late 1890s early 1900s.
Most of his books deal with how to become successful and what holds most
people back from achieving that objective.
This
book, Why Grow Old? is different. As I
began reading it I felt like Marden and I were sitting at a coffee shop
enjoying a cup of coffee and then it his me – Oh My God (OMG), he is talking
about and to me! I am at a point in my
life where he has described some of my thoughts.
Let’s
first set the stage. I am 72 years
old. I have a lot of physical issues
that were created many years ago through my involvement in sporting
activities. I have had 9 surgeries just
on my left knee. I have had both
shoulders repaired. I have had cateract
surgeries on both eyes. Plus several
other issues the latest of which is spinal stenosis of the lower back making it
difficult to walk any distance without experience pain in my lower back and
lower legs. I have a lot of reasons to
think about how I have grown old as Marden writes about in his book.
From
the book on the opening pages, emphasis is mine:
“The face cannot betray the years until the mind has given its consent. The mind is the sculptor,"
"We renew our bodies by renewing our thoughts; change our bodies, our
habits, by changing our thoughts." In those phrases, the
author summarizes a way of living, full of self-healing and vitality. In
the end, we don’t need all the money in the world, if we lose our health and
the joy of living.
Most
of Marden’s books are about how to become successful through character building
and thinking in a certain way. As the
above excerpt indicates, all the success in the world won’t mean very much if
we lose our health and subsequently our capacity for enjoying our success and
wealth or even prematurely die all due to ill health. More importantly he talks about that when we
think about growing old we then begin to act old in the way we dress and the
activities we engage in or not engage in.
In other words we become the mental picture we have created of what an
older person looks like and acts like.
But it need not be so!
Marden’s
advice on growing old is quite simple and is in keeping with what a lot of
other people have already said. We become more of whatever it is we think
about most. Therefore if we think
about growing old, we grow old. If we
think about sickness and ill health, we experience sickness and ill
health. On the reverse side of that
thought process; if we think about success, we become successful. If we think about great health and staying
young we experience great health and we stay young. BUT HE
DOES NOT STOP WITH JUST THE THOUGHT.
He goes on to explain HOW
science supports his believe in how to stay young in our looks, in how we act
and the activities we engage in. Young
people reading this may think the book is not for them but they would be wrong. Marden further explains that to be able to
think in a certain way first requires the knowledge behind the why that our thoughts
are important and then suggests that we create the habit of thinking in a
certain way. The best time to begin this
process is when we are young, not wait until we begin to grow older physically
and mentally before we begin work on creating the correct mental thoughts.
It’s
a short book, it’s a great book and best of all it costs only 99 cents on
Amazon.com as a Kindle read. In my
opinion, the book is priceless! For just
99 cents, what have you got to lose?
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