124. Inactivity
Today’s reading: “The Ministry of Healing” pp. 237d-239a.
We go back to “law” again today, and these two maxims sum it all up.
Action is a law of our being.
Inactivity is a fruitful cause of disease.
“Normal action” of every organ of the body gives strength and vigour, while disuse and misuse tend towards decay and death. Strength and vigour or decay and death, the choice literally is yours.
Inactivity affects the circulatory system, the skin and respiration, and results in disease. Even for invalids, complete rest is “seldom necessary.”
For brain workers, ministers, teachers, students (and most of us today), our major problem is “severe mental taxation, unrelieved by physical exercise.” Today we have this in spades. Stressful, mentally intensive jobs with sedentary lifestyle. The remedy,
- activity, proper exercise
- strict temperance
This would result in mental and physical vigour and endurance.
For the physically overworked, the remedy is outdoor exercise that is,
- planned to strengthen underused organs (what do you think that might be in the case of mental workers as compared to physical workers?… something along the lines of physical exercise for the mental workers and mental exercise for manual workers?)
- systematic
- agreeable
- “the heart should be in it”, never drudgery— most important.
So to sum up, it must be heart work that uses the whole body (system) and that encourages elevated thoughts (agreeable).
