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HOW OFTEN DO WE GET SICK?
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Shortly after World War II a team of UNESCO health experts were visiting the Balkans. A woman doctor stopped to talk about mother-and-child problems to a group of peasant women in a Bulgarian village. One of the young mothers, a lusty girl in her middle twenties, turned out to be the bride of the most important man in the community—a great oak of a man past ninety. The girl had felt highly honored when, having buried his fourth wife, the local bigwig had chosen her from among his neighbors' marriageable daughters to be Number Five. Now she was proudly showing off her son, born exactly nine months after the wedding. As the doctor told it afterwards, there was no doubt as to family resemblance. The child was a miniature replica of his father.
Startled, the doctor tried, as tactfully as she could, to draw the girl out. After all, she hinted, woman-to-woman, the man had grandsons older than the bride. Was there, perhaps, some tribal custom about stand-ins ... The girl seemed puzzled and in the end the doctor asked her question more plainly. Did the nonagenarian really still want sex? The girl's amazement showed in her face. Of course! Otherwise what would he want with a wife? Was the doctor trying to say that in other parts of the world things were different? Granted these rugged mountaineers, raised on mare's milk and goat cheese, are an exception even in their own country. Still the story suggests interesting speculation. Since the village apparently had never heard of impotence as a must for its senior citizens, might it not follow that, conditioned neither to fear nor even to expect it, the men simply did not succumb to it? The next question to ask ourselves is, inevitably, this: How often do we succumb to illness, weariness, and especially the creeping symptoms of old age, largely because that is the pattern we have been taught to envisage? Youth is a state of the soul, someone once said. Youth is also a state of the spirit, a state of mind, a state of the glands. It is a matter of the way the heart beats and the reflexes function. No one can hope to feel young if he is self-engrossed to the point of being the center of his universe. Now broaden this concept to encompass general well-being: again it is a matter of outlook—we feel as we have been conditioned to feel. Think of various persons you have known. Frail or vigorous, those you remember with pleasure are the ones whose spirit is in command, who can shrug off disappointment or misfortune or even pain not because of some absurd Polly anna mechanism or because they enjoy being martyrs, but because they have a sense of proportion—they never bog down. To such people enslavement by the body or by purely personal considerations is inconceivable. They can see well beyond themselves, hence they are free and well-adjusted human beings who remain on good terms with Time.
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