Becoming What You Contemplate

Browsing through John Masefield’s “The Everlasting Mercy” I caught a few lines that thrilled me. It was the picture of Saul Kane, the converted prize fighter who had gone to the country to escape his old, hampering environment, and to live a clean, Christian life. He was put to work ploughing a field and these two lines were descriptive of his ploughing: “His eyes forever on some sign / To help him plough a perfect line.” What a picture that is to some of us who, as boys, had to plough a perfect line and whose fathers taught us to keep an eye on a tree, a fence post, or a rock at the end of our furrow to help us plough a perfect line.

I want to add to that couplet a legend I recently found, a story of a man who had allowed himself to become stooped before his time. He decided to have a friend who was a sculptor make a statue of himself which was to be perfectly straight, with the shoulders as stiff as a ramrod, and body unbent. The sculptor completed the statue and then the stooped man hid it away in his garden in an inaccessible spot, and every day he would visit the spot and stand for a few minutes looking at it. Unconsciously he would straighten up during those minutes that he contemplated himself as straight and tall and true physically. After a few months his friends noticed that he even walked more erect and the old stoop of the shoulders seemed to have at least partially disappeared.

One day his little granddaughter saw her “Da,” as she called him, going off in the woods, and curious as to what his errand might be, she followed him down the path to his secret place. She saw her grandfather gazing at what seemed to be another “Da” made of bronze and could not comprehend the meaning of it. She was awed and more than a little frightened as she saw her grandfather looking at himself, as it seemed to her. Holding her breath she stood as though rooted to the spot, watching the mysterious scene. Then she noticed something which suddenly took her child-mind off the first wonder—and that was that her grandfather, who was usually bent, stood up straight and tall and firm. Then it was that her childish control left her and she cried out with a great wonder in her heart and a ring of delight on her lips! “Da, Da! Why you’re standing as straight as a tree! You’re straight, Da!” And he was! He had been so tremendously influenced by the statue of himself made by his sculptor friend that he had become an erect likeness of the statue through his admiration of the posture and constantly gazing at it.

In everyday life we contemplate, ponder, and admire, unaware that our mental functions are shaping our lives and our bodies. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he” is an ancient, pithy saying of that experience.