How to Look Younger | Inspirational Anti-Aging Podcast

Podcast Transcript: Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast, brought to you today by Ettitude, makers of fine organic bed sheets and duvet covers. Try out their silky soft bamboo lyocell bedding for 100 days risk free. Get 10% off your purchase by using the special coupon code: inspiration. Visit them online at Ettitude.com. That’s ETT-IT-UDE.com. Discover what it feels like to sleep on a cloud. Today’s podcast was edited and adapted from Turn Back the Years by Harry J. Gardener, published in 1937.

Today is the day of speed and spontaneity. In this modern world of quick decisions, lightning action and rapid, streamline transit, there is no room for ponderous deliberation and that which is aged. On every hand and side, wherever we go, whatever we do, we are constantly and incessantly reminded that this is the world of youth, that this is the age of youngness.

We see a thousand advertisements heralding the joy of youth. We see the millions of people the world over doing everything they can to achieve youth, to maintain it, or merely to hold the youth they already possess.

But because this world is a place of quick reaction and rapid motion, most of us overlook the most essential elements of remaining young. We pass them by hurriedly in our rush to the nearest and more obvious methods of relief. Youth is not a quality that can be purchased with cosmetics or at the corner drug store. Youth cannot be had for love or for money.

If most human beings only knew it, the actual price of youth is the lowest of any “bargain” in all the markets of the world. The purchase price is merely self- analysis and self-change. Why then, one asks, is youth so often missed, so often hungrily yearned for, when it can be so easily obtained?

Well, the fault lies in the state of mind of this age — the hurry, the pell-mell rush for success and a thousand other goals. The purpose of today’s talk is therefore to make you stop and think. For intelligent, concentrated thought, and consideration of one’s self are the finest helps obtainable.

There is hardly an individual living today who doesn’t desire youth, except, of course, those who are already young (and in the natural movement of Time, they, too, will soon be desiring it). With the assistance of modern scientific methods, there are a good many devices for rejuvenating the physical body. Some of them are fine, some of them are poor. But none of them are of any use whatsoever unless behind them lies the desire to be young, the desire to think youthfully, to react youthfully, to live and breathe youth.

Of course, not for a moment would it be sensible for elderly people to become kittenish. That’s not being young. Nothing is more irritating than an obviously old man cavorting around with a young girl, or a coy old dowager playing tennis with a young man in white flannel shorts. That isn’t regaining youth, that’s competing with it. And competition of that sort only makes youth seem more attractive and age seem more ridiculous.

The secret of turning back the years is partly internal and partly external. Youth is really growth, growth given the opportunity to flower and unfold naturally and gracefully. To achieve youth, therefore, even if you are eighty, you must sweep away the maze and mass of deterring habits (mental and physical) that make you act your age, and then give growth a chance…..

Read The Entire Essay in Evergreen: 50 Inspirational Life Lessons

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