And how did Tarkington react to this “worst of all disasters”? Did he feel: “This is it! This is the end of my life”? No, to his amazement, he felt quite gay. He even called upon his humour. Floating “specks” annoyed him; they would swim across his eyes and cut off his vision. Yet when the largest of these specks would swim across his sight, he would say: “Hello! There’s Grandfather again! Wonder where he’s going on this fine morning!”
How could fate ever conquer a spirit like that? The answer is it couldn’t. When total blindness closed in, Tarkington said: “I found I could take the loss of my eyesight, just as a man can take anything else. If I lost all five of my senses, I know I could live on inside my mind. For it is in the mind we see, and in the mind we live, whether we know it or not.”
In the hope of restoring his eyesight, Tarkington had to go through more than twelve operations within one year. With local anaesthetic! Did he rail against this? He knew it had to be done. He knew he couldn’t escape it, so the only way to lessen his suffering was to take it with grace. He refused a private room at the hospital and went into a ward, where he could be with other people who had troubles, too. He tried to cheer them up. And when he had to submit to repeated operations-fully conscious of what was being done to his eyes-he tried to remember how fortunate he was. “How wonderful!” he said. “How wonderful, that science now has the skill to operate on anything so delicate as the human eye!”
The average man would have been a nervous wreck if he had had to endure more than twelve operations and blindness. Yet Tarkington said: “I would not exchange this experience for a happier one.” It taught him acceptance. It taught him that nothing life could bring him was beyond his strength to endure. It taught him, as John Milton discovered, that “It is not miserable to be blind, it is only miserable not to be able to endure blindness.”
Margaret Fuller, the famous New England feminist, once offered as her credo: “I accept the Universe!”
When grouchy old Thomas Carlyle heard that in England, he snorted: “By gad, she’d better!” Yes, and by gad, you and I had better accept the inevitable, too!
If we rail and kick against it and grow bitter, we won’t change the inevitable; but we will change ourselves. I know. I have tried it.
I once refused to accept an inevitable situation with which I was confronted. I played the fool and railed against it, and rebelled. I turned my nights into hells of insomnia. I brought upon myself everything I didn’t want. Finally, after a year of self-torture, I had to accept what I knew from the outset I couldn’t possibly alter.
I should have cried out years ago with old Walt Whitman:
Oh, to confront night, storms, hunger,
Ridicule, accident, rebuffs as the trees
and animals do.
I spent twelve years working with cattle; yet I never saw a Jersey cow running a temperature because the pasture was burning up from a lack of rain or because of sleet and cold or because her boy friend was paying too much attention to another heifer. The animals confront night, storms, and hunger calmly; so they never have nervous breakdowns or stomach ulcers; and they never go insane.
Am I advocating that we simply bow down to all the adversities that come our way? Not by a long shot! That is mere fatalism. As long as there is a chance that we can save a situation, let’s fight! But when common sense tells us that we are up against something that is so-and cannot be otherwise- then, in the name of our sanity, let’s not look before and after and pine for what is not.
The late Dean Hawkes of Columbia University told me that he had taken a Mother Goose rhyme as one of his mottoes:
For every ailment under the sun.
There is a remedy, or there is none;
If there be one, try to find it;
If there be none, never mind it.
While writing this book, I interviewed a number of the leading business men of America; and I was impressed by the fact that they co-operated with the inevitable and led lives singularly free from worry. If they hadn’t done that, they would have cracked under the strain. Here are a few examples of what I mean:
J.C. Penney, founder of the nation-wide chain of Penney stores, said to me: “I wouldn’t worry if I lost every cent I have because I don’t see what is to be gained by worrying. I do the best job I possibly can; and leave the results in the laps of the gods.”
Henry Ford told me much the same thing. “When I can’t handle events,” he said, “I let them handle themselves.”
When I asked K.T. Keller, president of the Chrysler Corporation, how he kept from worrying, he said: “When I am up against a tough situation, if I can do anything about it, I do it. If I can’t, I just forget it. I never worry about the future, because I know no man living can possibly figure out what is going to happen in the future. There are so many forces that will affect that future! Nobody can tell what prompts those forces-or understand them. So why worry about them?” K. T. Keller would be embarrassed if you told him he is a philosopher. He is just a good business man, yet he has stumbled on the same philosophy that Epictetus taught in Rome nineteen centuries ago. “There is only one way to happiness,” Epictetus taught the Romans, “and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”
Sarah Bernhardt, the “divine Sarah” was an illustrious example of a woman who knew how to co-operate with the inevitable. For half a century, she had been the reigning queen of the theatre on four continents-the best-loved actress on earth. Then when she was seventy-one and broke-she had lost all her money-her physician, Professor Pozzi of Paris, told her he would have to amputate her leg. While crossing the Atlantic, she had fallen on deck during a storm, and injured her leg severely. Phlebitis developed. Her leg shrank. The pain became so intense that the doctor felt her leg had to be amputated. He was almost afraid to tell the stormy, tempestuous “divine Sarah” what had to be done. He fully expected that the terrible news would set off an explosion of hysteria. But he was wrong. Sarah looked at him a moment, and then said quietly: “If it has to be, it has to be.” It was fate.
As she was being wheeled away to the operating room, her son stood weeping. She waved to him with a gay gesture and said cheerfully: “Don’t go away. I’ll be right back.”
On the way to the operating room she recited a scene from one of her plays. Someone asked her if she were doing this to cheer herself up. She said: “No, to cheer up the doctors and nurses. It will be a strain on them.”
After recovering from the operation, Sarah Bernhardt went on touring the world and enchanting audiences for another seven years.
“When we stop fighting the inevitable,” said Elsie Mac-Cormick in a Reader’s Digest article, “we release energy which enables us to create a richer life.”
No one living has enough emotion and vigour to fight the inevitable and, at the same time, enough left over to create a new life. Choose one or the other. You can either bend with the inevitable sleet-storms of life-or you can resist them and break!
I saw that happen on a farm I own in Missouri. I planted a score of trees on that farm. At first, they grew with astonishing rapidity. Then a sleet-storm encrusted each twig and branch with a heavy coating of ice. Instead of bowing gracefully to their burden, these trees proudly resisted and broke and split under the load-and had to be destroyed. They hadn’t learned the wisdom of the forests of the north. I have travelled hundreds of miles through the evergreen forests of Canada, yet I have never seen a spruce or a pine broken by sleet or ice. These evergreen forests know how to bend, how to bow down their branches, how to co-operate with the inevitable.
The masters of jujitsu teach their pupils to “bend like the willow; don’t resist like the oak.”
Why do you think your automobile tyres stand up on the road and take so much punishment? At first, the manufacturers tried to make a tyre that would resist the shocks of the road. It was soon cut to ribbons. Then they made a tyre that would absorb the shocks of the road. That tyre could “take it”. You and I will last longer, and enjoy smoother riding, if we learn to absorb the shocks and jolts along the rocky road of life.
What will happen to you and me if we resist the shocks of life instead of absorbing them? What will happen if we refuse to “bend like the willow” and insist on resisting like the oak? The answer is easy. We will set up a series of inner conflicts. We will be worried, tense, strained, and neurotic.
If we go still further and reject the harsh world of reality and retreat into a dream world of our own making, we will then be insane.
During the war, millions of frightened soldiers had either to accept the inevitable or break under the strain. To illustrate, let’s take the case of William H. Casselius, 7126 76th Street, Glendale, New York. Here is a prize-winning talk he gave before one of my adult-education classes in New York:
“Shortly after I joined the Coast Guard, I was assigned to one of the hottest spots on this side of the Atlantic. I was made a supervisor of explosives. Imagine it. Me! A biscuit salesman becoming a supervisor of explosives! The very thought of finding yourself standing on top of thousands of tons of T.N.T. is enough to chill the marrow in a cracker salesman’s bones. I was given only two days of instruction; and what I learned filled me with even more terror. I’ll never forget my first assignment. On a dark, cold, foggy day, I was given my orders on the open pier of Caven Point, Bayonne, New Jersey.
“I was assigned to Hold No. 5 on my ship. I had to work down in that hold with five longshoremen. They had strong backs, but they knew nothing whatever about explosives. And they were loading blockbusters, each one of which contained a ton of T.N.T.-enough explosive to blow that old ship to kingdom come. These blockbusters were being lowered by two cables. I kept saying to myself: Suppose one of those cables slipped-or broke! Oh, boy! Was I scared! I trembled. My mouth was dry. My knees sagged. My heart pounded. But I couldn’t run away. That would be desertion. I would be disgraced-my parents would be disgraced-and I might be shot for desertion. I couldn’t run. I had to stay. I kept looking at the careless way those longshoremen were handling those blockbusters. The ship might blow up any minute. After an hour or more of this spine-chilling terror, I began to use a little common sense. I gave myself a good talking to. I said: ‘Look here! So you are blown up. So what! You will never know the difference! It will be an easy way to die. Much better than dying by cancer. Don’t be a fool. You can’t expect to live for ever! You’ve got to do this job-or be shot. So you might as well like it.”
“I talked to myself like that for hours; and I began to feel at ease. Finally, I overcame my worry and fears by forcing myself to accept an inevitable situation.
“I’ll never forget that lesson. Every time I am tempted now to worry about something I can’t possibly change, I shrug my shoulders and say: ‘Forget it.’ I find that it works-even for a biscuit salesman.” Hooray! Let’s give three cheers and one cheer more for the biscuit salesman of the Pinafore.
Outside the crucifixion of Jesus, the most famous death scene in all history was the death of Socrates. Ten thousand centuries from now, men will still be reading and cherishing Plato’s immortal description of it-one of the most moving and beautiful passages in all literature. Certain men of Athens- jealous and envious of old barefooted Socrates-trumped up charges against him and had him tried and condemned to death. When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison cup to drink, the jailer said: “Try to bear lightly what needs must be.” Socrates did. He faced death with a calmness and resignation that touched the hem of divinity.
“Try to bear lightly what needs must be.” Those words were spoken 399 years before Christ was born; but this worrying old world needs those words today more than ever before: “Try to bear lightly what needs must be.”
During the past eight years, I have been reading practically every book and magazine article I could find that dealt even remotely with banishing worry. … Would you like to know what is the best single bit of advice about worry that I have ever discovered in all that reading? Well, here it is-summed up in twenty-seven words-words that you and I ought to paste on our bathroom mirrors, so that each time we wash our faces we could also wash away all worry from our minds. This priceless prayer was written by Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, Professor of Applied Christianity, Union Theological Seminary, Broadway and 120th Street, New York.
God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; The courage to change the things I can; And the wisdom to know the difference.
To break the worry habit before it breaks you, Rule 4 is:
Co-operate with the inevitable.