Dr. Melton broke in, his voice uncertain, his face horrified: "Lydia, I cannot let you go on! you are unfair--you shock me.
You are morbid! I knew your father intimately. He loved you beyond expression. He would have done anything for you. But his profession is an exacting one. Put yourself in his place a little. It is all or nothing in the law--as in business."
But Lydia replied: "When you bring children Into the world, you expect to have them cost you some money, don"t you? You know you mustn"t let them die of starvation. Why oughtn"t you to expect to have them cost you thought, and some sharing of your life with them, and some time--real time, not just sc.r.a.ps that you can"t use for business?"
She made the same appeal once to her husband in regard to their own lives. She wanted to see and know more of him, his business, his inner life, and this was her cry: "Paul, I"m sure there"s something the matter with the way we live--I don"t like it! I don"t see that it helps us a bit--or anyone else--you"re just killing yourself to make money that goes to get things we don"t need nearly as much as we need more of each other! We"re not getting a bit nearer to each other--actually further away, for we"re both getting different from what we were without the other"s knowing how! And we"re not getting nicer--and what"s the use of living if we don"t do that? We"re just getting more and more set on scrambling ahead of other people. And we"re not even having a good time out of it! And here is Ariadne--and another one coming--and we"ve nothing to give them but just this--this--this--
Paul laughed a little impatiently, irritated and uneasy, as he always was at any attempt to examine too closely the foundations of existing ideas. "Why, Lydia, what"s the matter with you? You sound as though you"d been reading some fool socialist literature or something."
You know I don"t read anything, Paul. I never hear about anything but novels. I never have time for anything else, and very likely I couldn"t understand it if I read it, not having any education. That"s one thing I want you to help me with.
All I want is a chance for us to live together a little more, to have a few more thoughts in common, and oh! to be trying to be making something better out of ourselves for our children"s sake. I can"t see that we"re learning to be anything but--you, to be an efficient machine for making money, I to think of how to entertain as though we had more money than we really have.
I don"t seem really to know you or live with you any more than if we were two guests stopping at the same hotel. If socialists are trying to fix things better, why shouldn"t we have time--both of us--to read their books; and you could help me know what they mean?"
Paul laughed again, a scornful, hateful laugh, which brought the color up to Lydia"s pale face like a blow. "I gather, then, Lydia, that what you"re asking me to do is to neglect my business in order to read socialistic literature with you?"
His wife"s rare resentment rose. She spoke with dignity: "I begged you to be serious, Paul, and to try to understand what I mean, although I"m so fumbling, and say it so badly. As for its being impossible to change things, I"ve heard you say a great many times that there are no conditions that can"t be changed if people would really try--"
"Good heavens! I said that of _business_ conditions!" shouted Paul, outraged at being so misquoted.
"Well, if it"s true of them--No; I feel that things are the way they are because we don"t really care enough to have them some other way. If you really cared as much about sharing a part of your life with me--really sharing--as you do about getting the Washburn contract--"
Her indignant and angry tone, so entirely unusual, moved Paul, more than her words, to shocked protest. He looked deeply wounded, and his accent was that of a man righteously aggrieved. "Lydia, I lay most of this absurd outbreak to your nervous condition, and so I can"t blame you for it. But I can"t help pointing out to you that it is entirely uncalled for. There are few women who have a husband as absolutely devoted as yours. You grumble about my not sharing my life with you--why, I _give_ it to you entire!" His astonished bitterness grew as he voiced it. "What am I working so hard for if not to provide for you and our child--our children!
Good Heavens! What more _can_ I do for you than to keep my nose on the grindstone every minute. There are limits to even a husband"s time and endurance and capacity for work."
Hence it will be seen that I would have one Quit Worrying about the non-essentials of life, and this is best done by giving full heed to the essentials and letting the others go. Naturally, if one wilfully and purposefully determines to follow non-essentials, he may as well recognize the fact soon as late that he has deliberately chosen a course that cannot fail to produce its own many and irritating worries.
Another serious cause of worry is bashfulness. One who is bashful finds in his intercourse with his fellows many worries. His hands and feet are too large, he blushes at a word, he doesn"t know what to say or how, he is confused if attention is directed his way, his thoughts fly to the ends of the earth the moment he is addressed, and if he is expected to say anything, his worries increase so that his pain and distress are manifest to all. To such an one I would say: a.s.sert your manhood, your womanhood. Brace up. Face the music. Remember these facts. You are dealing with men and women, youths and maidens, of the same flesh and blood, mentality as yourself. You average up with the rest of them. Why should you be afraid? Call upon your reasoning power. a.s.sert the dignity of your own existence. You are here by the will of G.o.d as much as they. There is a purpose in your creation as much as in theirs. You have a right to be seen and heard as well as have they. Your life may be charged with importance to mankind far more than theirs. Anyhow for what it is, large or small, you are going to use it to the full, and you do not propose to be laughed out of it, sneered out of it, either by the endeavors of others or by your own fears of others. Then, when you have once fully reasoned the thing out, do not hesitate to plunge into the fullest possible a.s.sociation with your fellows. Brave them, defy them (in your own heart), resolutely face them, and my word and a.s.surance for it, they will lose their terror, and you will lose your bashfulness with a speed that will astonish you.
Closely allied to bashfulness as a cause of many worries is hyper- or super-sensitiveness. And yet it is an entirely different mental att.i.tude. Hyper-sensitiveness may cause bashfulness, but there are many thousands of hyper-sensitives who have not a spark of bashfulness in their condition. They are full of vanity or self-conceit. Elsewhere I have referred to one of these. Or they are hyper-sensitive in regard to their health. They mustn"t do this, or that, or the other, they must be careful not to sit near a window, allow a door to be open, or go into an unwarmed room. Their feet must never be wet, or their clothing, and as for sleeping in a cold room, or getting up before the fire is lighted, they could not live through such awful hardships.
I have no desire to excoriate or make fun of those who really suffer from chronic invalidism, yet I am fully a.s.sured that much of the hyper-sensitiveness of the neurasthenic and hypochondriac could be removed by a little rude, rough and tumble contact with life. It would do most of these people no harm to follow the advice given by Abernethy, the great English physician, to a pampered, overfed hyper-sensitive: Live on six pence a day _and earn it_. I have found few hyper-sensitives among the poor. Poverty is a fine cure for most cases, though there are those who cling to their pride of birth of education, or G.o.d knows what of insane belief in their superiority over ordinary mortals, and make that the occasion, or cause, of the innumerable and fretting worries of hyper-sensitiveness.
Another serious cause of worry, in this busy, bustling, rapid age, is the need we feel for hurry. We are caught in the mad rush and its influence leads us to feel that we, too, must rush. There is no earthly reason for our hurry, and yet we cannot seem to help it.
Hurry means worry. Rush spells fret. Haste makes waste. You live in the country and are a commuter. You must be in the city on the stroke of nine. To do this, you must catch the 8:07. You have your breakfast to get and it takes six minutes to walk to the station. No one can do it comfortably in less. Yet every morning, ever since you took this country cottage, you have had to rush through your breakfast, and rush to the depot in order to catch the train. Thus starting the day on the rush, you have continued "on the stretch" all day, and get back home at night tired out, fretted and worried "almost to death." Even when you sit down to breakfast, you begin to worry if wifie doesn"t have everything ready. You know you"ll be late. You feel it, and if the toast and coffee are not on the table the moment you sit down, your querelous complaints strike the morning air.
Now what"s the use?
Why don"t you get up ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes earlier, and thus give yourself time to eat comfortably, and thus get over the worry of your rush? Set the alarm clock for 7:00, or 6:45, or even 6:30. Far better get up half an hour too early, than worry yourself, your wife, and the whole household by your insane hurry. Your worry is wholly unnecessary and shows a fearful lack of simple intelligence.
Annie Laurie, who writes many sage counsels in the _San Francisco Examiner_, had an excellent article on this subject in the issue of December 31, 1915. She wrote:
Here is something that I saw out my window--it has given me the big thought for my biggest New Year"s resolution. The man at the corner house ran down the steps in a terrible hurry. He saw the car coming up the hill and whistled to it from the porch, but the man who was running the car did not hear the whistle. Anyway, he didn"t stop the car, and the man on the steps looked as if he"d like to catch the conductor of that car and do something distinctly unfriendly to him, and do it right then and there. He jammed his hat down over his forehead and started walking very fast.
"What"s your hurry?" said the man he was pa.s.sing on the corner.
"What"s your hurry, Joe?" and the man on the corner held out his hand.
"Well, I"ll be--," said Joe, and he held out his hand, too, "if it isn"t--"
And it was, and they both laughed and shook hands and clapped each other on the back and shook hands again.
"What"s your hurry?" said the man on the corner again.
"I dun-no," said the man who was so cross because he"d lost his car.
"Nothing much, I guess," and he laughed and the other man laughed and they shook hands again. And the last I saw of them they had started down the street right In the opposite direction from which the man in the hurry had started to go, and they weren"t in a hurry at all.
Do you know what I wished right then and there? I wished that every time I get into the senseless habit of rushing everywhere and tearing through everything as if it was my last day on earth and there wasn"t a minute left to lose, somebody would stop me on the corner of whatever street of circ.u.mstance I may be starting to cross and say to me in friendly fashion:
"What"s the hurry?"
What is the hurry, after all? Where are we all going? What for?
What difference does it make whether I read my paper at 8 o"clock in the morning or at half-past 9?
Will the world stop swinging in its...o...b..t if I don"t meet just so many people a day, write so many letters, hear so many lectures, skim through so many books? Of course if I"m earning my living I must work for it and work not only honestly but hard. But it seems to me that most of the terrific hurrying we do hasn"t much to do with really essential work after all. It"s a kind of habit we get into, a sort of madness, like the thing that overtakes the crowd at a ferry landing or the entrance to a train. I"ve seen men, and women, too, fairly fight to get onto a particular car when the next car would have done just exactly as well.
Where are they going in such a hurry? To save a life? To mend a broken heart? To help to heal a wounded spirit? Or are they just rushing because the rest do it?
What do they get out of life--these people who are always in a rush?
Look! The laurel tree in my California garden is full of bursting buds! The rains are beginning and the trees will soon be flecked with a silver veil of blossoms. I hadn"t noticed it before. I"ve been too busy.
What"s your hurry? Come, friend of my heart, I"ll say that to you to-day and say it in deep and friendly earnest.
What"s your hurry? Come, let"s go for a walk together and see if we can find out. Let us keep finding out through all the new year.
There are many other causes of worry, some of them so insidious, so powerful, as to call for treatment in special chapters.
CHAPTER VIII
PROTEAN FORMS OF WORRY
In a preceding chapter, I have shown that worry is a product of our modern civilization, and that it belongs only to the Occidental world.
It is a modern disease, prevalent only among the so-called civilized peoples. There is no doubt that in many respects we _are_ what we call ourselves--the most highly civilized people in the world. But do we not pay too high a price for much of our civilization? If it is such that it fails to enable us to conserve our health, our powers of enjoyment, our spontaneity, our mental vigor, our spirituality, and the exuberant radiance of our life--bodily, mental, spiritual--I feel that we need to examine it carefully and find out wherein lies its inadequacy or its insufficiency.
While our civilization has reached some very elevated points, and some men have made wonderful advancement in varied fields, it cannot be denied that the ma.s.s of men and women are still groping along in the darkness of mental mediocrity, and on the mud-flats of the commonplace. Ten thousand men and women can now read where ten alone read a few centuries ago. But what are the ten thousand reading? That which will elevate, improve, benefit? See the piles of sensational yellow novels, magazines, and newspapers that deluge us day by day, week by week, month by month, for the answer. True, there are many who desire the better forms of literature, and for these we give thanks; they are of the salt that saves our civilization.
I do not wish to seem, even, to be cynical or pessimistic, but when I look at some of the mental pabulum that our newspapers supply, I cannot but feel that we are making vast efforts to maintain the commonplace and dignify the trivial.
For instance: Look at the large place the Beauty Department of a newspaper occupies in the thoughts of thousands of women and girls.
Instead of seeking to know what they should do to keep their bodies and minds healthful and vigorous, they are deeply concerned over their physical appearance. They write and ask questions that show how worried they are about their skin--freckles, pimples, discolorations, patches, etc.--their complexion, their hair, its color, glossiness, quant.i.ty, how it should be dressed, and a thousand and one things that clearly reveal the _improper emphasis_ placed upon them. I do not wish to ignore the basic facts behind these anxious questionings. It is right and proper that women (and men also) should give due attention to their physical appearance. But when it becomes a mere matter of the _outward_ show of cosmetics, powders, rouges, washes, pencils, and things that affect the outside only, then the emphasis is in the wrong place, and we are worrying about the wrong thing. Our appearance is mainly the result of our physical and mental condition. If the body is healthy, the skin and hair will need no especial attention, and, indeed, every wise person knows that the application of many of the cosmetics, etc., commonly used, is injurious, if not positively dangerous.
Then, too, observation shows that too many women and girls go beyond reasonable attention to these matters and begin to worry over them.
Once become slaves to worry, and every hour of the day some new irritant will arise. Some new "dope" is advertised; some new fashion devised; some new frivolity developed. Vanity and worry now begin to vie with each other as to which shall annoy and vex, sting and irritate their victim the more. Each is a nightmare of a different breed, but no sooner does one bound from the saddle, before the other puts in an appearance and compels its victim to a performance. Only a thorough awakening can shake such nightmares off, and comparatively few have any desire to be awakened. I have watched such victims and they arouse in me both laughter and sadness. One is sure her hair is not the proper color to match her complexion and eyes. It must be dyed. Then follows the worries as to what dye she shall use, and methods of application. Invariably the results produce worry, for they are never satisfactory, and now she is worried while dressing, while eating, and when she goes out into the street, lest people notice that her hair is improperly dyed. Every stranger that looks at her adds to the worry, for it confirms her previous fears that she does not look all right. If she tries another hair of the dog that has already bitten her and allows the hair specialist to guide her again, she goes through more worries of similar fashion. She must treat her hair in a certain way to conform to prevailing styles--and so she worries hourly over a matter that, at the outside, should occupy her attention for a few minutes of each day.