“Three minutes later, all hell broke loose. Six depth charges exploded all around us and pushed us down to the ocean floor -a depth of 276 feet. We were terrified. To be attacked in less than a thousand feet of water is dangerous-less than five hundred feet is almost always fatal. And we were being attacked in a trifle more than half of five hundred feet of water -just about knee-deep, as far as safety was concerned. For fifteen hours, that Jap minelayer kept dropping depth charges.
If a depth charge explodes within seventeen feet of a sub, the concussion will blow a hole in it. Scores of these depth charges exploded within fifty feet of us. We were ordered ‘to secure’- to lie quietly in our bunks and remain calm. I was so terrified I could hardly breathe. ‘This is death,’ I kept saying to myself over and over. ‘This is death! … This is death!’ With the fans and cooling system turned off, the air inside the sub was over a hundred degrees; but I was so chilled with fear that I put on a sweater and a fur-lined jacket; and still I trembled with cold. My teeth chattered. I broke out in a cold, clammy sweat. The attack continued for fifteen hours. Then ceased suddenly. Apparently the Jap minelayer had exhausted its supply of depth charges, and steamed away. Those fifteen hours of attack seemed like fifteen million years. All my life passed before me in review.
I remembered all the bad things I had done, all the little absurd things I had worried about. I had been a bank clerk before I joined the Navy. I had worried about the long hours, the poor pay, the poor prospects of advancement. I had worried because I couldn’t own my own home, couldn’t buy a new car, couldn’t buy my wife nice clothes. How I had hated my old boss, who was always nagging and scolding! I remembered how I would come home at night sore and grouchy and quarrel with my wife over trifles. I had worried about a scar on my forehead-a nasty cut from an auto accident.
“How big all these worries seemed years ago! But how absurd they seemed when depth charges were threatening to blow me to kingdom come. I promised myself then and there that if I ever saw the sun and the stars again, I would never, never worry again. Never! Never! I Never!!! I learned more about the art of living in those fifteen terrible hours in that submarine than I had learned by studying books for four years in Syracuse University.”
We often face the major disasters of life bravely-and then let the trifles, the “pains in the neck”, get us down. For example, Samuel Pepys tells in his Diary about seeing Sir Harry Vane’s head chopped off in London. As Sir Harry mounted the platform, he was not pleading for his life, but was pleading with the executioner not to hit the painful boil on his neck!
That was another thing that Admiral Byrd discovered down in the terrible cold and darkness of the polar nights-that his men fussed more about the ‘ ‘pains in the neck” than about the big things. They bore, without complaining, the dangers, the hardships, and the cold that was often eighty degrees below zero. “But,” says Admiral Byrd, “I know of bunkmates who quit speaking because each suspected the other of inching his gear into the other’s allotted space; and I knew of one who could not eat unless he could find a place in the mess hall out of sight of the Fletcherist who solemnly chewed his food twenty-eight times before swallowing.
“In a polar camp,” says Admiral Byrd, “little things like that have the power to drive even disciplined men to the edge of insanity.”
And you might have added, Admiral Byrd, that “little things” in marriage drive people to the edge of insanity and cause “half the heartaches in the world.”
At least, that is what the authorities say. For example, Judge Joseph Sabath of Chicago, after acting as arbiter in more than forty thousand unhappy marriages, declared: “Trivialities are at the bottom of most marital unhappiness”; and Frank S. Hogan, District Attorney of New York County, says: “Fully half the cases in our criminal courts originate in little things. Bar-room bravado, domestic wrangling, an insulting remark, a disparaging word, a rude action-those are the little things that lead to assault and murder. Very few of us are cruelly and greatly wronged. It is the small blows to our self-esteem, the indignities, the little jolts to our vanity, which cause half the heartaches in the world.”
When Eleanor Roosevelt was first married, she “worried for days” because her new cook had served a poor meal. “But if that happened now,” Mrs. Roosevelt says, “I would shrug my shoulders and forget it.” Good. That is acting like an adult emotionally. Even Catherine the Great, an absolute autocrat, used to laugh the thing off when the cook spoiled a meal.
Mrs. Carnegie and I had dinner at a friend’s house in Chicago. While carving the meat, he did something wrong. I didn’t notice it; and I wouldn’t have cared even if I had noticed it But his wife saw it and jumped down his throat right in front of us. “John,” she cried, “watch what you are doing! Can’t you ever learn to serve properly!”
Then she said to us: “He is always making mistakes. He just doesn’t try.” Maybe he didn’t try to carve; but I certainly give him credit for trying to live with her for twenty years. Frankly, I would rather have eaten a couple of hot dogs with mustard-in an atmosphere of peace-than to have dined on Peking duck and shark fins while listening to her scolding.
Shortly after that experience, Mrs. Carnegie and I had some friends at our home for dinner. Just before they arrived, Mrs. Carnegie found that three of the napkins didn’t match the tablecloth.
“I rushed to the cook,” she told me later, “and found that the other three napkins had gone to the laundry. The guests were at the door. There was no time to change. I felt like bursting into tears! All I could think was: ‘Why did this stupid mistake have to spoil my whole evening?’ Then I thought-well-why let it? I went in to dinner, determined to have a good time. And I did. I would much rather our friends think I was a sloppy housekeeper,” she told me, “than a nervous, bad-tempered one. And anyhow, as far as I could make out, no one noticed the napkins!”
A well-known legal maxim says: De minimis non curat lex- “the law does not concern itself with trifles.” And neither should the worrier-if he wants peace of mind.
Much of the time, all we need to overcome the annoyance of trifles is to affect a shifting of emphasis-set up a new, and pleasurable, point of view in the mind. My friend Homer Croy, who wrote They Had to See Paris and a dozen other books, gives a wonderful example of how this can be done. He used to be driven half crazy, while working on a book, by the rattling of the radiators in his New York apartment. The steam would bang and sizzle-and he would sizzle with irritation as he sat at his desk.
“Then,” says Homer Croy, “I went with some friends on a camping expedition. While listening to the limbs crackling in the roaring fire, I thought how much they sounded like the crackling of the radiators. Why should I like one and hate the other? When I went home I said to myself: ‘The crackling of the limbs in the fire was a pleasant sound; the sound of the radiators is about the same-I’ll go to sleep and not worry about the noise.’ And I did. For a few days I was conscious of the radiators; but soon I forgot all about them.
“And so it is with many petty worries. We dislike them and get into a stew, all because we exaggerate their importance. …”
Disraeli said: “Life is too short to be little.” “Those words,” said Andre Maurois in This Week magazine, “have helped me through many a painful experience: often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. … Here we are on this earth, with only a few more decades to live, and we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year’s time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worth-while actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings. For life is too short to be little.”
Even so illustrious a figure as Rudyard Kipling forgot at times that “Life is too short to be little”. The result? He and his brother-in-law fought the most famous court battle in the history of Vermont-a battle so celebrated that a book has been written about it: Rudyard Kipling’s Vermont Feud.
The story goes like this: Kipling married a Vermont girl, Caroline Balestier, built a lovely home in Brattleboro, Vermont; settled down and expected to spend the rest of his life there. His brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier, became Kipling’s best friend. The two of them worked and played together.
Then Kipling bought some land from Balestier, with the understanding that Balestier would be allowed to cut hay off it each season. One day, Balestier found Kipling laying out a flower garden on this hayfield. His blood boiled. He hit the ceiling. Kipling fired right back. The air over the Green Mountains of Vermont turned blue!
A few days later, when Kipling was out riding his bicycle, his brother-in-law drove a wagon and a team of horses across the road suddenly and forced Kipling to take a spill. And Kipling the man who wrote: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you”- he lost his own head, and swore out a warrant for Balestier’s arrest I A sensational trial followed. Reporters from the big cities poured into the town. The news flashed around the world. Nothing was settled. This quarrel caused Kipling and his wife to abandon their American home for the rest of their lives. All that worry and bitterness over a mere trifle! A load of hay.
Pericles said, twenty-four centuries ago: “Come, gentlemen, we sit too long on trifles.” We do, indeed!
Here is one of the most interesting stories that Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick ever told-a story about the battles won and lost by a giant of the forest:
On the slope of Long’s Peak in Colorado lies the ruin of 3 gigantic tree. Naturalists tell us that it stood for some four hundred years. It was a seedling when Columbus landed at San Salvador, and half grown when the Pilgrims settled at Plymouth. During the course of its long life it was struck by lightning fourteen times, and the innumerable avalanches and storms of four centuries thundered past it. It survived them all. In the end, however, an army of beetles attacked the tree and leveled it to the ground. The insects ate their way through the bark and gradually destroyed the inner strength of the tree by their tiny but incessant attacks. A forest giant which age had not withered, nor lightning blasted, nor storms subdued, fell at last before beetles so small that a man could crush them between his forefinger and his thumb.
Aren’t we all like that battling giant of the forest? Don’t we manage somehow to survive the rare storms and avalanches and lightning blasts of We, only to let our hearts be eaten out by little beetles of worry-little beetles that could be crushed between a finger and a thumb?
A few years ago, I travelled through the Teton National Park, in Wyoming, with Charles Seifred, highway superintendent for the state of Wyoming, and some of his friends. We were all going to visit the John D. Rockefeller estate in the park. But the car in which I was riding took the wrong turn, got lost, and drove up to the entrance of the estate an hour after the other cars had gone in. Mr. Seifred had the key that unlocked the private gate, so he waited in the hot, mosquito-infested woods for an hour until we arrived. The mosquitoes were enough to drive a saint insane. But they couldn’t triumph over Charles Seifred. While waiting for us, he cut a limb off an aspen tree-and made a whistle of it. When we arrived, was he cussing the mosquitoes? No, he was playing his whistle. I have kept that whistle as a memento of a man who knew how to put trifles in their place.
To break the worry habit before it breaks you, here is Rule 2:
Let’s not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Remember “Life is too short to be little.”
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Chapter 8 – A Law That Will Outlaw Many of Tour Worries
As a child, I grew up on a Missouri farm; and one day, while helping my mother pit cherries, I began to cry. My mother said: “Dale, what in the world are you crying about?” I blubbered: “I’m afraid I am going to be buried alive!”
I was full of worries in those days. When thunderstorms came, I worried for fear I would be killed by lightning. When hard times came, I worried for fear we wouldn’t have enough to eat. I worried for fear I would go to hell when I died. I was terrified for fear an older boy, Sam White, would cut off my big ears-as he threatened to do. I worried for fear girls would laugh at me if I tipped my hat to them. I worried for fear no girl would ever be willing to marry me. I worried about what I would say to my wife immediately after we were married. I imagined that we would be married in some country church, and then get in a surrey with fringe on the top and ride back to the farm … but how would I be able to keep the conversation going on that ride back to the farm? How? How? I pondered over that earth-shaking problem for many an hour as I walked behind the plough.
As the years went by, I gradually discovered that ninety-nine per cent of the things I worried about never happened.
For example, as I have already said, I was once terrified of lightning; but I now know that the chances of my being killed by lightning in any one year are, according to the National Safety Council, only one in three hundred and fifty thousand.
My fear of being buried alive was even more absurd: I don’t imagine that one person in ten million is buried alive; yet I once cried for fear of it.
One person out of every eight dies of cancer. If I had wanted something to worry about, I should have worried about cancer -instead of being killed by lightning or being buried alive.
To be sure, I have been talking about the worries of youth and adolescence. But many of our adult worries are almost as absurd. You and I could probably eliminate nine-tenths of our worries right now if we would cease our fretting long enough to discover whether, by the law of averages, there was any real justification for our worries.
The most famous insurance company on earth-Lloyd’s of London-has made countless millions out of the tendency of everybody to worry about things that rarely happen. Lloyd’s of London bets people that the disasters they are worrying about will never occur. However, they don’t call it betting. They call it insurance. But it is really betting based on the law of averages. This great insurance firm has been going strong for two hundred years; and unless human nature changes, it will still be going strong fifty centuries from now by insuring shoes and ships and sealing-wax against disasters that, by the law of average, don’t happen nearly so often as people imagine.
If we examine the law of averages, we will often be astounded at the facts we uncover. For example, if I knew that during the next five years I would have to fight in a battle as bloody as the Battle of Gettysburg, I would be terrified. I would take out all the life insurance I could get. I would draw up my will and set all my earthly affairs in order. I would say: “I’ll probably never live through that battle, so I had better make the most of the few years I have left.” Yet the facts are that, according to the law of averages, it is just as dangerous, just as fatal, to try to live from age fifty to age fifty-five in peace-time as it was to fight in the Battle of Gettysburg. What I am trying to say is this: in times of peace, just as many people die per thousand between the ages of fifty and fifty-five as were killed per thousand among the 163,000 soldiers who fought at Gettysburg.