Physical exercise is something which can be carried to extremes.  We can go at the work so intensely that we become muscle-bound and develop some structural enlargements that we do not need.  This happens very often among athletes.  The ordinary man should fight shy of such plans.  Superfluous strength is only for those who have need of it.  What we really want is strength enough to carry us through our daily rounds with comfort and a feeling of efficiency.

In a sense we all live by our wits and these decline when not properly fed by our general physical organization.  Prize fighters are not the longest lived people, nor are the professional athletes.  Their calling requires extra building up which would be a positive handicap to the average man whose manner of life doesn’t require this super-development.  In other words, there are intemperate methods of exercising just as there are of eating and drinking.  We may easily go too far.  Again, we can sin just as greatly by not going far enough.  There was a time when men of forty were as worn and old as men of sixty-five and seventy are today.  As a matter of fact, nowadays a half-century mark is no longer a badge of senility when a man has kept himself fit and treated himself right.

We all have friends who are pretty well along in years by virtue of their carefully planned physical training, plus their cheerful dispositions.  They are as sprightly and companionable as though they were many years younger.  We should come to know early in life what a large part good humor plays in physical fitness.  In previous chapters hearty laughter was extolled as one of the very best of exercises.  It is an organizer in itself and opens up the heart and lungs as nothing else will do.  It makes the blood go galloping all through the system.  It is one of the best automatic blood circulators in the business.

Laughter takes the stress off of the mind, and whatever is ahead of us for the day that seems likely to become a burden is soon turned into an ordinary circumstance.  We smile as we go about doing it.

A friend once said to a banker: 

“How do you know when to lend money?”

The banker replied: 

“I look a man in the eye and then I do or I don’t.”

The friend said: 

“I would like to borrow ten thousand dollars—­now!”

“You shall have it, Sir,” the banker replied.

This meant that the man who asked for the loan was in a state of physical and mental preparedness.  If he had gone into the banker’s office looking like an animated tombstone he wouldn’t have had much of a chance to borrow the ten thousand.  It goes without saying that the open-faced, hearty fellow inspires confidence.  There is nothing coming to the dried-up, sour chap, and that’s what he usually gets.  And what we get is largely a matter of our physical well being.  A modern philosopher observed that “the blues are the product of bad livers”—­and there is no doubt but that he was right.