law for the health and strength of the body, and obey it implicitly, and to the letter, with all possible intelligence, you cannot keep it healthy if the mind that owns the body is pulling it and twisting it, and twanging on its delicate machinery with a flood of resentment and resistance; and the spirit behind the mind is eager, wretched, and unhappy, because it does not get its own way, or elated with an inflamed egoism because it is getting its own way.

All plain common sense in the way of health for the body falls dead unless followed up closely with plain common sense for the health of the mind; and then again, although when there is “a healthy mind in a healthy body,” the health appears far more permanent than when a mind full of personal resistance tries to keep its body healthy, even that happy combination cannot be really permanent unless there is found back of it a healthy spirit.

But of the plain common sense of the spirit there is more to be said at another time.

With regard to the mind, let us look and see not only that it is not sensible to allow it to remain full of resistance, but is it not positively stupid?

What an important factor it should be in the education of children to teach them the plain common sense needed to keep the mind healthy—­to teach them the uselessness of a mental resistance, and the wholesomeness of a clean mind.

If a child worries about his lessons, he is resisting the possibility of failing in his class; let him learn that the worry interferes with his getting his lesson.  Teach him how to drop the worry, and he will find not only that he gets the lesson in less time, but his mind is clearer to remember it.

By following the same laws, children could be taught that a feeling of rush and hurry only impedes their progress.  The rushed feeling sometimes comes from a nervous unquiet which is inherited, and should be trained out of the child.

But alas! alas! how can a mother or a father train a child to live common sensibly without useless resistance when neither the mother nor the father can do that same themselves.  It is not too late for any mother or father to learn, and if each will have the humility to confess to the child that they are learning and help the child to learn with them, no child would or could take advantage of that and as the children are trained rightly, what a start they can give their own children when they grow up—­and what a gain there might be from one generation to another!  Will it ever come?  Surely we hope so.

CHAPTER XXX

A Summing Up

GIVE up resentment, give up unhealthy resistance.

If circumstances, or persons, arouse either resentment or resistance in us, let us ignore the circumstances or persons until we have quieted ourselves.  Freedom does not come from merely yielding out of resentment or unhealthy resistance, it comes also from the strong and steady focus on such yielding. Concentration and relaxation are just as necessary one to another to give stability to the nerves of a man—­as the centrifugal and centripetal forces are necessary to give stability to the Earth.