26. So far as you are wholly concentrated on bringing about a certain result, clearly the quicker and easier it is brought about the better. Your resolve to secure a sufficiency of food for yourself and your family will induce you to spend weary days in tilling the ground and tending livestock; but if Nature provided food and meat in abundance ready for the table, you would thank Nature for sparing you much labor and consider yourself so much the better off. An executed purpose, in short, is a transaction in which the time and energy spent on the execution are balanced against the resulting assets, and the ideal case is one in which _________________________. Purpose, then, justifies the efforts it exacts only conditionally, by their fruits.Q) but if Nature provided food and meat in abundance ready for the table,
= ready for the table이 수식하는 단어는 food and meat인가요? 아니면 abundance인가요?
혹시 이 문장을 해석하는 데 필요한 숙어나 구문이 따로 있는 건가요?
28. Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship, or train. There is an almost peculiar correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do. The task can be as paralyzing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand. Thinking improves when parts of the mind are given other tasks, are charged with listening to music or following a line of trees.

Q) The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.= 여기서 말하는 it은 무엇을 의미하는 건가요? 해설지나 해설강의를 보면 thinking이라고 하는데요, the mind 아닌가요?

궁금합니다.
답변 부탁드립니다.
:)