Call, Annie Payson, 1853-1940 / 2008-07-27 00:00:00

To take what we can
and be thankful, not only enables us to gain more from every source
of health, but opens the way for us to see clearly how to get more.
This complaint, however, is less of an impediment than the whining
and fussing which come from those who are free to take all four in
abundance, and who have the necessity of their own especial physical
health so much at heart that there is room to think of little else.
These people crowd into the various schools of physical culture by
the hundred, pervade the rest-cures, and are ready for any new
physiological fad which may arise, with no result but more physical
culture, more rest-cure, and more fads. Nay, there is sometimes one
other result,--disease. That gives them something tangible to work
for or to work about. But all their eating and breathing and
exercising and resting does not bring lasting vigorous health,
simply because they work at it as an end, of which self is the
centre and circumference.
The sooner our health-instinct is developed, and then taken as a
matter of course, the sooner can the body become a perfect servant,
to be treated with true courtesy, and then forgotten. Here is an
instinct of our barbarous ancestry which may be kept and refined
through all future phases of civilization. This instinct is natural,
and the obedience to it enables us to gain more rapidly in other,
higher instincts which, if our ancestors had at all, were so
embryonic as not to have attained expression.
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