Sound in Body, Mind, and Morals

It is, of course, possible to work, to serve, to accomplish many things without being well balanced, without peace and health and happiness, without the full and well-rounded living of life. Even a man with an unquiet conscience can account for some accomplishment. But how much more accomplishment could he account for if he had the poise that comes with peace, with an awareness of sound mental and moral and physical foundations.

One of the barriers to fitness is imbalance, excesses, the failure of what is sometimes called common sense. In the rally healthy and happy man, there is a kind of wholeness⎯wholesomeness, we sometimes call it. “Wholesome” is a meaningful word which the dictionary defines as “spiritual or mental health or well-being . . . beneficial to character . . . sound in body, mind and morals.” It is the opposite of dissipation, of extremes and excesses; the opposite of immorality, of a brooding spirit, a clouded mind, a cluttered conscience; the opposite of harmful habits.

Wholesomeness is an awareness that “wickedness never was happiness,” nor war anything else that upsets the harmonious working of mind and spirit and physical functioning. The sounder we are physically, mentally, morally, the safer we are, and the more effective and happier we are in the pursuit to life’s great and wonderful purposes.

To cite again some lines from John Locke: “” sound mind in a sound body is a short, but full description of a happy state in this world . . . The great principle and foundation of all virtue and worth is plac’d in this: that a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, . . .though the appetite lean the other way . . .” With wholesomeness come wisdom and knowledge and the peace of a quiet conscience.