Invisible exercise; seven studies in self command with practical suggestions and drills

Front matter

vO o

S K

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. On Being Noticed by One's Doctor i

. II. On Being Noticed by One's Self 3

Part One Exercises For Lazy And Busy Men

I

Adventures in Not Walking

, . .1. Exercise for Lazy and Busy Men 23

. II. Exercising a Lot in a Little 27

. III. The Exercise of Keeping Still 35

. rV. A Hundred People Open My Eyes 39

V. How to Like Walking as Well as Dancing 43

VI. Walking an Hour in Ten Minutes ,,,,,,,,, 51

II Adventures in Sitting Down

I. Learning to Sit Down: My First Sit 61

. II. Learning to Sit Down: My Second Sit 64

. III. I Struggle with the Easy Chair 67

. TV. Rehearsals on a Stool 70

V. Rehearsals in a Morris Chair 73

VI. Parlors and Backs 76

.VII. Learning to Lounge ,,,,,,,,,,,., 78

vii viii Contents m

Lying Down Efficiently

CBJOnZ PAGE

I. Learning to Lie Down 83

II. Learning to Lie Down: The Wiggle Test 85

III. Learning to Lie Down: The Hang Test 94

IV. People Who Thump 97

Vt People with Light Heads and Light Feet, ,,,,,,,, 102

IV Sleeping Fast

L The Truth About Sleep 111

n. A Religion for Going to Bed 113

ni. Just What Happens When One Sleeps Fast 117

rV. The Art of Steering One's Sleep:

The Art of Liking to Get Up 120

V, Just What Happens When One Sleeps Slow:

Directions for Not Letting It Happen 123

VI. The Sleepless Bogey 128

Vn. The Feeling Tired Fake ,,....... 132

Part Two Advertising Ones Self To One's Self

I

Getting the Attention of a Body

I. The Body as a Machine:

Where to Take Hold First to Get Its Attention. . 141

II. In and Up 148

III. Up and In 1S3

IV. How to Take a Longer Back 157

V. Being as Tall as One Likes 161

Contents ix n

Four Drills

CHAPTER PAGS

I. Introducing the Drills 171

n. The Lie-Down Drill 175

ni. The Sit-Down Drill 184

^ IV. Sitting Orders 190

V. Standing Orders 195

VI. Introducing the Walking Orders 199

VII. Walking Orders 202

VIII. Sliding Scale of Orders 208

III

Getting the Attention of a Mind

I. A Working Conception of Self Control:

The Self Control of Animals 217

n. Our Dogs and Us 221

III, What Any Man Can Learn from a Dog. ,,,,,,,,, 227

IV

Going Forward to Nature

I. Folks and Machines 235

n. People Who Make Nature Hum:

Exercise Addicts 239

m. Letting Nature be Natural 244

IV. A Bridge, Some Stairs and a Moral 251

The Bridge 251

The Stairs 252

The Moral 255

Contents

V Looking Up the Open Road

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Consent to Live 261

II. The Use of Fads and Taboos 266

Closing Introduction

Why There Is One 275

i. Putting the First Thing First 275

ii. Still Putting the First Thmg First 277

iii. This Book and Education 280

iv. This Book and the Practical Teacher 281

V, This Book and the Reader ,,,.,,.,,,»,,,, 285

Appendix

Invisible Exercise and Christian Science 293

Others 297

STARTER § i. On Being Noticed hy One's Doctor

\\T HEN I step in to a dentist with a * " toothache, and he has that noble cheerful professional interest in my tooth and in saving my interesting tooth, I feel like saying to him, "But how about mef^ He regards me — all the rest of the six feet of me — as a semi-detached encumbrance or inconvenience which somehow that tooth, that absorbingly interesting tooth that has got to be saved, must put up with. What happens to me in the six weeks — to all the rest of me — seems to him a meddlesome idea to bring up. I am a subhead under an incisor.

The way a man feels with his dentist (that is with the average run of dentist — not with mine) is the way he feels with nearly all the men who make a profession of looking after the things in him that don't work.

They are a fine type of men, no doubt, but most of the health experts we go to, to set us up, the men who prescribe programs to us, and regimens for keeping fit, are alike in one thing. It does not seem to have occurred to them to notice us — to notice that we are plain busy people.

Most of our health experts in America do not seem to take American men as they actually are and as they actually have to live, seriously. What they seem to be interested in, is in telling us what we should do if we were somebody else.

What American men ought to do today — most of us living under conditions of competition largely beyond our control — is to get together, face out all these self-centered specialists — health-sticklers who are trying to put health over on us in a way that is convenient for them, or for millionaires, or for angels, but not for us — and tell them in a body what we think.

We are weary of standing before physicians and, in some painful broken-down moment of our lives, having them tell us placidly and as if they were in some other world, just what the things are, we must do to be well, when all the time they know, and everybody knows, that there is no possible way in which anyone who lives in this one, can do them.

We want physicians to notice us, stop putting up regimens and programs for us — for ordinary busy human men — of things to do that only an angel or an acrobat would try to do, and that only a millionaire or a Methuselah would have time for.

If we American men today, instead of having health-experts in a hundred thousand towns and cities trying to put health over on us, in our most helpless and foolish moments, would get together, and instead of taking what they hand out to us, would put in our order to them, for some kind of health-idea, or health-technique that fitted into the lives we have to live, what would this order be like?

§ ii. On Being Noticed by One's Self

Here is my declaration of independence, or bill of rights, as to what I want and do not want, in the way of a program for health-command.

First. — I do not want to be an Angel — give up everything I like, right and left, to live — be a noble, wonderful and beautiful character to digest a dinner.

Too many waste motions — it seems to me — ^just for a dinner.

Second: — I do not want to be an Acrobat.

Of course, if a man really likes it, if he really enjoys standing on his head, walking on his elbows, squirming his stomach and hanging from a trapeze, taking all the pains a monkey has to, to be well, there is no objection, but I don't like it. These things do a monkey good because he is entertained by them. The monkey's way is not a very bright way for me — I cannot help thinking. As in being an angel, there are too many waste motions.

Third. — I do not want to be a Chemist, study my proteids, indulge in fat worries and acid cares while I eat. I do not understand people who, with nice hearty human foods steaming up to them from their plates, sit and brood and moon chemically before they eat. People who, when they are dining with me, put in all their time thinking of their stomachs instead of thinking of me, seem to me rude. I have no use for people who talk about belonging to a Society for Controlling The Appetites, as if it were belonging to a church, people who are Pharisees with a Welsh rabbit — all these delicate sterilized souls brought up on predigested baby foods, who save their saliva, who weigh their pepsin, who are always coddling their faint vague weak alimentaries before everybody.

I do not say I blame people — ^people who seem to like these deep dreamy visceral broodings — I suppose they are doing the best they can according to their liver and lights, but it must be bad for them. And why should not the study of diet be attended to, decently and privately and once for all and got out of the way?

I believe in chemistry. I believe in saliva and in gastric juice and in pancreatic fluids and all the other chemicals one has to have, as much as anyone, but it does not go with my nature, somehow, at a dinner table to stop doting on the sweetbreads on my plate and sit and dote on mine.

I am not for my sweetbreads. My sweetbreads are for me. If a man is perpetually taking care of his interior utilities they cannot be worth it.

Fourth, — I want health to burn. I do not want anything to do with a doctor more than once, who tells me that I must look out for my health. I propose to have health that looks after me. A man who, with the actual connivance of a serious doctor, arranges with himself to keep niggling at being well, who keeps making nice little moral dabs at his health, insults nature and slanders God. He is mooning about what health is. I propose to have health to burn or die. The sense every minute, every day, of having health to burn, is what health is.

Fifth. — I do not want to be evicted from my life — put out on the sightseeing dump of the world — in order to be well. If I can help it, I am going to keep out of the hands of a doctor who will make me believe that I must break away from everything I care for, — the ambitions and enthusiasms for which I live — make a great Baedeker-gap in my life, and take a long staring vacation or die. I want a setting-up exercise or program which will rescue me from deliberately vacating my life, and going around outside of everything looking into other people's windows, watching other people live. I glory in my work, and if the way I do it, is not good for me I propose to know why.

Sixth. — I do not want to be evicted from myself to be well — ^put off with a health program that proceeds upon the assumption that the only possible thing to do with a man who has a natural gift or enthusiasm that is doing its best to run away with him, is to emasculate him. All persons, relatives, doctors, friends, enemies or advisers who will deliberately take, or seek to take, the legitimate natural enthusiasm or central power in a man's life — the creative (desire he finds it difficult to master, and that it is desirable he should find it difficult to master — put this enthusiasm on the one side of him as his secret enemy and then put some safe, drab, tame, meek health, 'way over on the other side of him, as his only friend and savior and tell him solemnly he must choose between these two, must turn against one to have the other — I say that people who do this are superficial and dangerous people to be allowed a hand in a real man's life. They are off on their facts — as to the actual psychology of health control.

They turn the whole process of healthcontrol precisely around.

When a man has a great natural force — a driving power in him that urges him on, the natural gift for seeing a thing so deeply and for caring about it so much he will die for it — this natural force in him, instead of being regarded as his handicap, should be grabbed by his physician with a hurrah as the supreme incalculable asset the man has, with which a physician can compel him to be well.

If a physician instead of looking at a man as a bag of meat and bones, would study him as a whole human being, and would then take hold of the center-hold in the man, he could handle everything else In him. The moment a man really believes and plainly sees his physician conceiving his health-program for him, and presenting it to him as a part of his day's work, as the best way to get into a day three times as much work, he will meet his physician more than half way. He will begin to fairly plot, to daily conspire with his physician, to help him have health.

The kind of doctor live men are looking for today is the doctor who bones down to his job, the doctor who can really make a sale of some health to a patient, who studies each patient as a whole — studies out a specific technique for him in the way other efficiency engineers do, for living his own particular kind of life.

§ Hi. On Not Grabbing Health by the Tail

If a man does not propose to be an angel, an acrobat or a chemist to be well — has signed up once for all on his bill of rights as a human being, and has set out to have health to burn, without being turned out of his job, and without being evicted from his own life — what is there he can do to find a technique, a daily program for keeping fit which he can put through himself?

My own feeling is that this technique for health a man should look for, if it is going to be one he will really put through, should have four outstanding points.

It should be simple — one single thing to 'do.

It should be sure. It should be of such a nature that he will fully understand it and believe in it, will know that it works and'why it works.

It should be short, so that it can be conveniently fitted into his daily life and will really be used.

It should be self-running. It should be a technique which when a man has once mastered himself with it, becomes a habit, makes him master of himself daily, automatically and without his thinking of it.

The most important of these four points is that one's technique for health control — for getting the attention of one's body, should be simple.

As I figure it, there are In this country just now — allowed perfectly wild and loose in it — just twenty-nine sets of people out hankering after every man's health.

The first thing a man wonders about and wants to know, facing these twenty-nine people, is how to be simple.

lo Invisible Exercise

Here is the list of the twenty-nine sets of people one has to extract simplicity from.

The Eddyites *

The Psycho-Utterers (New thought)

The Psycho - Putterers (Psycho - analysts)

The Zone Psychists

The Hypos (The hypnotists)

The Sanita Hummers

The Ortheopedites

The Osteopathites

The Dieteaters

The Vegetableites

The Vibratites or Buzzers

The Squoogers and Squirmers

The Chiropracticklers

Toothites

Hittites (boxers)

Pillites

Cutters and Excavators

Germers and Sterilizers

Ductless-Glanders

Chewers

Breathers

Fire (bakers and broilers)

Water

Mud

Muldoon *

These twenty-nine sets of people while they are a bit confusing are very much alike, in one regard. They are all alike in making one feel that health is an anxious and complicated problem to be met by the full brunt of one's religion — by calling upon God, or by calling upon somebody who will be anxious for one.

There are four courses of action the ordinary exposed American can take with regard to the twenty-nine ideas these people say he must keep thinking of.

( 1 ) He can say Pooh ! to the whole twenty-nine, and put them off on God.

(2) He can go to their twenty-nine places one after the other and try out on the premises each idea — as long as he lasts.

(3) He can stay at home and every day

*The people in this list, from The Christian Scientists to Muldoon are named not without regard — in some cases the very highest regard for their contribution to our time, as the reader will see later in this book and in the appendix.

I am merely giving the list here in this way just to run the gamut of the bewilderment of the world, and show what any simplicity a man may get, has to be extracted from.

as he goes to bed or gets up in the morning or sits down to a meal he can think of the twenty-nine things he has got to remember — the twenty-nine things they all say he has got to keep thinking of, every minute, every hour, every day, — as long as he lasts.

(4) He can insist on being simple. He can say he will not keep nagging himself every day thinking of the twenty-nine things, that he will see the twenty-nine things as they are in their relation to one another, jam the whole twenty-nine into one and think of that.

More people would have time to be well and would stop postponing it, if someone would just mention to this country, what this one thing to be thought of was.

I have found myself asking myself two or three questions about it and making preliminary answers as well as I could.

From what direction should I look for such an idea to come?

Not from the twenty-nine specialists and experts, but from some common or garden kind of man who is tired of being cut up and separated, and tired of having one twenty-ninth of him cured at a time.

What would I know the idea by when It came?

I decided that whatever else might be true of this central idea, a hundred million people want, there was one thing of which I could be sure. There would be something inevitable about it, universal and elemental. I would not make the mistake of looking for it as if it would have to be some great thundering discovery that would take people's breath away. I would know it probably at first by its seeming almost foolishly simple.

It would be an idea which, when once acted on and carried out would involve no worry, no philosophy, no religion, no scientific study, no profound expert, to help a normal man to take advantage of it.

Probably too, this centralizing idea would turn out to be something old and made up of almost disgracefully familiar facts — facts people think they see, but never see enough to see together.

What I propose to do in these pages is to take a few of these facts — facts I have experienced and that we all have experienced, look at them hard enough and long enough, to steady them, focus them and act on them together.

Three Little N. B.'s I

This is not going to be an anxious book on health.

An anxious book on health is a disease of itself. There is not going to be a single pathological minute in this book.

I should hate — just because I am writing about being well — to be abandoned by a hundred million husky readers of books in this country and feel myself being sidetracked, put off in what I have to say, on a vast lonely Physiological Siding with invalids and tired people.

If I had dared I would have swept across the whole front of this book in big bouncing letters the title

FOR WELL MEN ONLY

I would rather add twenty per cent to the efficiency of well men than sixty per cent to the efficiency of sick ones. Sick men do sick things, or tired things, and the more one adds to their efficiency — the more one is exposing the country to them, and exposing the world. One does not want to wish sick men were dead, but when one thinks of the world today and of what sick men — (In Russia for instance) the more efficient ones, are doing to it, and of what tired or hysterical men are doing to it — the last thing one wants to be a party to, is saying anything or whispering anything in this world just now that will make the sick more efficient in it.

The things I have to say are human, not pathological, and are addressed — addressed above all others — to men who feel fine, who are never conscious of anything more than some passing vague discomfort, and who would be amused at the idea of there being any particular need of their reading a book on learning to lie down or on learning to sit up.

II

It would be too bad to feel people following up what I have to say about self-control, because of any false pretension or over pretension. So I like to say before anyone goes on any further, that the people in this world who, instead of getting a good honest straight self-control themselves — a self-control that has some nerve in it because they have got it themselves — expect to have some nice ready-made self-control handed over to them,

I wish also to disclaim writing in these pages for people who want to be told what to do about their health — ^people who expect to be given rules and orders and to be told to mind, who want to be tucked up in bed by Mother, shut their eyes, have a pill put in their mouths and trust Providence and the Pill — ^particularly the Pill.

A pill does for a man what it is supposed to do anyway — whatever he does — does it when he is asleep.

There is no pill — spiritual or otherwise in this book.

And there is no authority in it — no big bow-wow. It is just one man getting up and telling a straight plain story of what has happened to him.

What the nice white space at the end of each chapter says is. Take It Or Leave It.

Ill

If there were any way it could be managed I would have this book equipped with a powerful little steel spring in the back and the book would shut up tight all by itself, no matter what the reader thought or said, every fifteen minutes.

It would remain locked for five minutes for the reader to think.

A reader really ought to be allowed that long, while reading, — it seems to me — to think. Incidentally among other things he thinks of in his Rve minutes, locked out of the book, he can think whether he really wants to go on in it as much as he thinks he (does. Then if he likes he can go on.

This provision for letting a reader spend fifteen minutes in having things happen to him and five minutes in assimilating them — In making some sense out of them for his own life, is no more than Is really fair to an author.

Of course, a cook in placing food before people, cannot help having a natural halfguilty hope that he is cooking it so well, or bringing the flavor out so much, that they will want to eat more at a time than they ought.

But after all, when all Is said and done, what is really good in this book is what Is going to happen or can be made to happen when the reader is taking his turn, or during the reader^s five minutes. The situation be-

,i8 Invisible Exercise

tween us — between author and reader as it seems to me, sums up something like this:

(i) Food should not be blamed for being eaten too fast or too much. Why should pie on a plate be held responsible for not sinking away gracefully from before a man, just in time — back through his plate?

(2) An author in a book obviously cannot shut himself up just in time as he can in talking.

(3) A steel spring with an alarm-clock attachment shutting me back into this book is impracticable.

The only possible substitute I can think of is to say squarely before we go on that it seems to me that Vv^hen the reader comes along and sees the author — -sees me, for instance, lying in this way helpless in my own book — as helpless as pie on a plate, and when the reader knows that I should be shut up, and when the reader knows that I cannot shut myself up, won't he please shut me up for me?

PART ONE Exercises for Lazy and Busy Men

I. Adventures in Not Walking. II. Adventures in Sitting Down.

III. Lying Down Efficiently.

IV. Sleeping Fast.

I

ADVENTURES IN NOT WALKING

EXERCISE FOR LAZY AND BUSY MEN

A FRIEND I met in the train the other -^ ^ day asked me what I was doing just now and I said I was writing of some of my adventures in sitting down.

"Tacks ?'^ he said.

I told him tacks were safe and sane — even insipid — as compared with other things people did or let themselves in for, in sitting down.

When a man sits down on a tack he is instantly reminded v/hat he is about and instantly does something about it.

When a man — a well man, a man who is strong enough not to notice — sits down eight hours a day in a chair at his desk in a way that begins quietly, steadily lopping years off the end of his life, while he may not get excited about it — it would do him good if he did — he would find his adventures in not doing it any more, and in sitting as he never sat before, quite as interesting and quite as much to the point as a tack.

I am introducing to people in this book 23 what some of these adventures are like and what they have led me to.

What I am dealing with in it, is the driving power of the busy man — the secret for the active man, of frictionless motion and of swift and efficient rest.

The great majority of people one sees about one are wasting half their strength every day, doing their walking, standing, sitting, and lying down, in ways which throw, and daily keep throwing, their bodies out of gear. The more they do, and keep doing these four rather dangerous things, the more they damage and warp the physical machine, the more friction there is in the way the machine runs, the more comfort and sense they cut out of living, and the more they limit their efficiency and shorten their lives.

The reason the average man is sick is that he does these things all day in a position of body which makes, and would be obliged to make, any sensible person sick. He is running his health on too low a gear for his health to work.

For the most part the average civilized man today is doing the same thing with his body, that he does when he throws away eighty-seven per cent of the motor-value of coal. He is using thirteen per cent of the

Exercise for Lazy and Busy Men 25

motor value of the body and letting eighty-seven go. He is doing this mainly by friction — by not holding the different parts of the body where they were fitted in to be and have to be, to do their work. Because of the way he holds himself, it tires him to sit. Very often it even tires him to sleep.

This book is the story of one man's experience in finding out that this statement is a true statement of what is happening to many people today.

It is not written by a man who is setting himself up as an expert in self-control, but by a man who is finding out — among other people who are finding out — a way to live. I am telling this story of what I have found out, to compare it with others. The story is the simple story of a man who thought he learned to walk when he was a baby, a man who thought he knew how to sit up, who has practiced on sitting at a desk thirty years, and who at least thought he knew how to lie down, who has found out at fifty that he didn't ever really learn how to do any of these things, and is learning how now.

As he has been going about practicing on himself and watching other people he has

26 Invisible JSxercise.

come to one or two unexpected conclusions about civilized people as they are living today.

Knowing how to walk, apparently, is very rare. Very few people can even stand still. Sitting and lying down are so lazy that nobody ever tries, ever uses any brains at all to do them and thinks any old way will do. Hundreds of millions of people in the world today — people who spend twenty-five years of their lives lying in bed and probably twenty years more of their lives sitting in chairs — have never once really thought out how to do them.

As one never misses a minute in all one^s life in doing one or the other of these four things it does seem as if they were worth doing rather well, and I have been studying myself, and studying other people for some little time as well as I could, and have picked out and put into daily use for myself what seems to me to be the fundamental principle of the four natural positions the human machine has to run in — the principle of sitting, standing and walking with quickness and ease, and of lying down and sleeping fast.