I am trying to stage this book, and our relationship, upon practical things we are to talk about. I want you to know and feel I have hoped and feared even as you have.
I am in the midst of these things even now as I write this book. I am not in a reflective mood, living in the past or glorying in deeds of other days. I am writing this today and of today, even as you are reading it today.
By day I face reality and problems, and temptations and tricks and frauds and deceits, and after the day is over I write these lines and try to inoculate myself with a serum or toxin that will serve as a safeguard on the morrow to ward off the things which try to annoy and distract me from my purpose: to do, and to be, as nearly right and fair as I can, in act and thought and word.
Continuity on a singleness of purpose is a valuable thing. Fabre spent his life studying insect life. His books on the spider and others on the life of insects are the result of a whole life spent on the one hobby or study of insects.
My occupation has been full of abrupt changes. Each day is a kaleidoscope, and so, as I write between times, these chapters may be like the boy who said of the dictionary, "a mighty powerful book but the subject changes so often."
I write these chapters as the spirit moves and opportunity allows, and you may read the same way. But be sure you make opportunity happen often.
OBSERVATION
Sitting on the Side Lines, Watching the Crowd
There is fun and interest and diversion all around us. All we need is keen observation and we will see much that pa.s.ses unnoticed to the preoccupied person.
What an interesting thing is the great round world we live in. The people are as interesting as fish in an aquarium.
See the rushing, surging crowd. Man, pushing along searching for necessary things to be done, he builds cities, harnesses rivers, makes ships to sail the seas to the uttermost parts of the earth. Man goes to war, he builds death-dealing devices.
Man makes the desert blossom like a rose.
Here is the scientist in his laboratory, trying to unite certain elements to produce new substance. Here is the beauty in her silken nest; here the lover; there the musician; yonder the peanut man and in the office building is the captain of industry: All busy bees deeply absorbed in their respective interests, and intoxicated in the belief that they are important and greatly necessary.
Yet in the broad measure of ages they are mere ripples on the sea of time, faint bubbles on the eternal deep, and grains of sand at the mountain foot.
Great man by his own measure, minute man by the great measure of time.
Mammoths to the near-sighted, mites to the far-sighted. Hustle and bustle, crowd and push. They tramp down the weaker brothers in the mad race after the golden shekels, which are only measures of ability to buy and own material things; symbols of power to make others serve you.
These golden shekels which men fret, sweat and fight for, can only buy physical and material things.
Away from the crowd is the little group who have learned a great truth, which is, happiness is not to be bought with gold. This little minority knows that mental pleasures are best, and that mental pleasures cannot be found on the great highway of material conquest.
The puffy, corn-fed millionaire pities the man who is content to live with small means and enjoys what he has to the full extent.
The wise man is he who gets the fullness out of life, happiness, respect, content, freedom from worry, who is busy doing useful things, busy helping his brother, busy training his children, busy spreading sunshine and love and the close-together feeling in his home circle.
The corn-fed, hardened, senseless, money-mad, dollar-worshipper knows not peace. Smiles seldom linger on his lips. Peace never rests in his bosom, cheer never lights his face. He is simply a fighting machine, miserable in solitude, suffering when inactive and sick when resting.
The money-chaser is up and doing, working like a Trojan, because occupation takes his mind off the painful picture of his misspent opportunity and his destroyed natural instinct. When fighting for gold he forgets his appalling poverty of the really worth-while things in the world.
Like the drunkard in his cups the intoxication makes him forget, and he is negatively happy.
Money received as reward for doing things worth while is laudable.
We cannot sit idly by and neglect to earn money to provide food, shelter and education for our loved ones, but between times we should seek the wealth that comes from right mental employment.
The millionaire thinks, dreams and gets dollars and that is all.
The worth-while man thinks kindness, usefulness, self-improvement, brotherhood, love, and he gets happiness.
The man who discovers means to help his fellowman, does a good act, but it is the man with the dollars in front of his eyes that commercializes the discovery and invention.
In the end the man that helped mankind fares better than the man who made the millions.
It"s a great crowd surging by, and very few have the good sense to learn the value of TODAY. That great crowd I see below my window thinks ever of tomorrow and forgets TODAY.
Those who think always of tomorrow will never get the beauties and joys from life that comes to the little group, of Today, who appreciates and enjoys the real Now, rather than the pictured Tomorrow that never comes.
It"s mighty interesting to watch the crowd go by and speculate on their movements.
Save up your pennies, measure everything by the dollar standard, think dollars, dream dollars, work, slave, push for the dollars and you will build a fortune. You will never have peace or recreation, or joy; you will live only in hope of a some day when you will retire. That"s the way the millionaires travel life"s highway.
Some day the paper will announce the death of those millionaires and then the dollars will be blown in by reckless heirs, and so the grinding wheels roll on.
Surely there are many ways of looking at things. Surely there is much of interest in the crowd. Surely there is an unending fund from which to speculate, in that crowd way down on the street below my window.
What pa.s.sions, what hopes, what joys, what sorrows, are in the hearts of that hurrying, worrying crowd.
What noise this din of traffic makes, what activity man has stirred up.
A picture, a drama, a tragedy, a comedy, all these I see in the human ants that run along below the hive where I sit and write these lines.
The phone rings and my little Nancy Lou"s voice says, "Daddy, will you please bring me a pencil and a tablet with lines on it."
So I must needs stop this, whatever you may call it, and push through the crowd to get that tablet with "lines on it" for my Nancy Lou; and there is some feeling of happiness and content and peace in Daddy"s heart as he lays down his pen, for Daddy is going Home, and that word means a lot in his little family, where they all say "Daddy" instead of Papa or Father.
DOING THINGS TWICE
A Common Habit That Saps Nerve Power
It is hard enough to do duty once, but doubly hard when you antic.i.p.ate mentally everything you have to do tomorrow.
This doing things twice is a habit easily acquired if you don"t watch out, and it means wasted energy.
I have just read the experience of a housewife who was resting on a couch reading; her eye caught sight of a book lying on the floor across the room.
Instantly her mindometer, if I may coin a word, registered, "when you get up, pick up that book."
She went on reading, but her mind was not on the magazine she held, but on that book on the floor.