How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions | Page 4

to throttle the villain and call for help.
Then we see, at the close of the day, the little girl, unconscious of her share in the life of others, come back to her room and fall asleep murmuring her New Year's hymn which, in spite of appearances, she still trusts. We are left with the hope that she will awaken next day to realize who she is and come into her own.
Thus journey we all through life often forgetting that there is nothing small, that "there is no last nor first." We are conscious of noble aims, but oblivious of the real work we are doing and of our own identity.
What, do you ask, has such a poetic drama to do with such a commonplace subject as health or the prolonging of life?
The question implies a misconception. Human development is not a material thing but is poetic and exalted. It has to do not merely with physical conditions but primarily with spiritual ideals. Let us observe more closely how Browning wakes Pippa up. When she comes to consciousness she utters a cry of joy and thanksgiving;
"Day! Faster and more fast, O'er night's brim, day boils at last."
The joyous thanksgiving of this first moment is the key to Pippa's life and to her influence through the whole day. Such was the right beginning to her day and such is the right beginning for us all to every day of our lives. Her faith and her hymn revealed the true ideals of this strange journey we call life.
There is an old proverb: "Guard beginnings." If a stream is poisoned at its head it will carry the deadly taint through its whole course.
The most significant moment of life is the moment of awakening.
The importance of morning has been more or less realized in the instinct of the human heart in every age.
Many of the myths of the early Greeks refer to the miracle of the morning. Aurora mirrors to us in a mystic way the significance of this hour to the Greeks. Athene was born by the stroke of the hammer of Heph?stus on the forehead of Zeus, and thus the stroke of fire upon the sky became the symbol or myth of all civilization. Even Daphne, pursued by Apollo, and turned into a tree, is doubtless the darkness fleeing before dawn until the trees stand out clearly defined in the morning light.
The dawn of day has always been considered a prophecy of the time when all ignorance will vanish before the light of truth.
When we remember that men of the early ages had no other light but that of the sun, we can see how naturally the coming of morning impressed primitive peoples, and it is not much wonder that they adored and worshiped the dawn and the rising sun.
We still speak of the dawn of a new civilization. Morning is still the most universal figure of progress, the type of a new life. More than all other natural occurrences it is used as a symbol of something higher.
May we not, accordingly, discover that from a psychological as well as a physiological point of view, for reasons of health and development, morning is the most significant and important time of the day!
No human being at the first moment of awakening is gloomy or angry. Everyone awakes in peace with all the world. It is a time of freedom. A moment later memory may bring to the mind some scene or picture that leads to good or bad thought, followed by emotion. This first moment of consciousness is the critical and golden moment of human life. How often has it been said to a child: "You must have gotten out of the wrong side of bed this morning."
Even animals and birds feel the significance of morning. Who has not, at early dawn, heard a robin or some other bird begin to sing--"at first alone," as Thomas Hardy says, "as if sure that morning has come, while all the others keep still a moment as if equally sure that he is mistaken." Soon, however, voice after voice takes up the song until the whole woodland is ringing with joyous tones. Who, in such an hour, has not been deeply moved with the spirit and beauty of all life and the harmony and deep significance of all of nature's processes?
If we observe the awaking of birds and animals more carefully, however, we find something besides songs.
All the higher animals go through certain exercises on first waking. There seems a universal instinct which teaches that certain stretches, expansions and deep breathings are necessary at this time. In fact, these actions are so deeply implanted in the instinct of animals that they seem a kind of sacred acceptance of life, a species of thanksgiving for all that life