Health… Happiness… and Physical Fitness

In a few sentences we should like to share some thoughts on physical fitness, on health and happiness. People may perform well despite physical frailties, despite impairments, despite ill health, and many heroically do; but this doesn’t set aside the fact that a person could better think, could better serve, could better perform with all sides of himself fully functioning.
Thomas Carlyle said this to the students of Edinburgh University: “In the midst of your zeal and ardor, …remember the care of health…health is a thing to be attended to continually; …you are to regard that as the very highest of all temporal things for you.”
If a person studies himself sick, he is guilty of excess; if he works himself sick, if he eats himself sick, if in any way he abuses or indulges himself sick, he is guilty of excess; or if he languishes in laziness, he is guilty of excess.
The same gracious Father who gave us the opportunities of life and mind and spirit gave us also our physical faculties, and the whole man is a harmonious working of one with the other. And the defacement or impairment or abuse of the body, or the impeding of its processes by anything that should not be taken into it, would be a disrespect for one of the greatest gifts the Lord God has given.
The sounder we are physically, mentally, and morally, the safer we are, the more effective we are. “A sound mind in a sound body,” said John Locke, “is a short, but full description of a happy state in this world…keep the body in strength and vigor, so that it may be able to obey and execute the orders of the mind; …consent to nothing but what may be suitable to the dignity and excellency of the rational creature…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…”
Everyone who best would serve himself, his family, his country, his God; who best would fit himself for life here and for life everlasting, should train and discipline himself, keep free from sickness as fully as he can, free from abuses, from habits, from appetites, from practices or perversions that would in any way be deteriorating to mind or soul or physical functioning, or that would impair the best possibilities for health and happiness.
All should work and think and eat and exercise, and avoid excesses, avoid the unfit things, avoid indolence and idleness, that they may “…run and not be weary, and walk and not faint.”—and live out in usefulness the fullness of life with “…wisdom and… treasures of knowledge,…” with mind and spirit and body working together, with gratitude for all the Lord God has given.