we can master our moods, we can never do our best work. No man who is at the mercy of his moods is a free man. He only is free who can rise to his dominion in spite of his mental enemies. If a man must consult his moods every morning to see whether he can do his best work, or only some unimportant task during the day; if he must look at his mental thermometer when he rises, to see whether his courage is rising or falling, he is a slave; he cannot be successful or happy.
How different is the outlook of the man who feels confident every morning that he is going to do a man's work, the very best that he is capable of, and that no mood or outward circumstance can hinder that accomplishment. How superbly he carries himself who has no fear, no doubt, no anxiety.
It is true that this supreme self-dominion, which marks one calm, powerful soul in a million who fret and stew and are mastered by their moods, is one of the last lessons of culture, but it is a prerequisite to great achievement, and by proper effort it is possible to all. When this is attained, we need no longer envy those serene souls who impress us with e sense of power, of calm, unhesitating assurance, who travel toward their goal with the rhythm and majesty of the celestial bodies. They are only those who have learned to think correctly, to master their moods and, with them, men and circumstances; and we can be like them if we will.
Training under pressure is the finest discipline in the world. You know what is right and what you ought to do, even when you do not feel like doing it. This is the time to get a firm grip on yourself, to hold yourself steadily to your task, no matter how hard or disagreeable it may be. Keep up this rigid discipline day after day and week after week, and you will soon learn the art of arts—perfect self-mastery.
Chapter VIII.
Unprofitable Pessimism
The universe pays every man in his own coin; if you smile, it smiles upon you in return; if you frown, you will be frowned at; if you sing, you will be invited into gay company; if you think, you will be entertained by thinkers; if you love the world, and earnestly seek for the good therein, you will be surrounded by loving friends, and nature will pour into your lap the treasures of the earth.—Zimmerman.
CONSIDERING how unprofitable such efforts are, it is surprising how many people make a business of looking for trouble, of cultivating and coaxing it, and running to meet it. They find the thing they look for. No one ever looked for trouble yet without finding plenty of it. This is because one can make trouble of anything if the mind is set that way. It is said that during the development of the West, in the days of rough frontier life, the men who always went armed with pistols, revolvers, and bowie-knives always got into difficulties, while the men who never carried arms, but trusted to their own good sense, self-control, tact, and humor, rarely had trouble. The incident that meant a shooting affray to the armed man was merely a joke to the more sensible unarmed men. It is just so with the seekers for ordinary trouble. By constantly holding discouraged, dejected, melancholy, gloomy thoughts, they make themselves receptive to all that depresses and destroys. What to a cheerful person would be a trifling incident, to be laughed at and dismissed from the mind, becomes, in the minds of the croakers, 'a thing of dire portent, an occasion for unutterable gloom and foreboding.
Most unhappy people have gradually become so by forming the habit of unhappiness, complaining about the weather, finding fault with their food, with crowded cars, and with disagreeable companions or work. The habit of complaining, of criticising, of faultfinding or grumbling over trifles, the habit of looking for shadows, is one most unfortunate to contract, especially in early life, for after a while the victim becomes a slave. All of the impulses become perverted, until the tendency to pessimism, to cynicism, is chronic.
There are specialists in these trouble-seekers. Thousands of people go looking for disease. They keep on hand antidotes for malaria, and something for colds, and medicine for every possible ailment, and they are sure they will all come sometime. When they take a journey across the continent or to Europe they carry a regular drug-store with them, a remedy for every supposed ill that they are likely to strike; and, strange to say, these people are always feeling ill, they are always having colds, and catching contagious diseases. Others, who never anticipate trouble, who are always believing the best instead of the worst, will go abroad and never take remedies with them, and they rarely have any trouble.
Some people are always looking for malaria, they are always snuffing about for sewer gas and for impure air; the locality where they live must be unhealthy, too high or too low, too sunny or too shady. If they have any little ache or pain, they are sure it is malaria. Of course they eventually get it because they looked for it, they anticipated it, they expected it They would be disappointed if they found they were mistaken. The fact is that the only thing that is wrong is their own minds. If there is malaria in the mind, if there is miasma in the thought, these things will appear in the body. It is only a question of time.
Some of these trouble-seekers fix on the stomach as the storm-centre of misfortune. They have elaborate mental charts of what “agrees with” them and what “disagrees with” them, and are always secretly hoping to be able to find some new indigestible viand. They swallow a bit of dyspepsia with every mouthful of food, for they feel sure that everything they eat will hurt them. The suspicious thought, the fear thought, reacts upon the digestion, demoralizes the gastric juice or prevents its secretion entirely, and, of course, there is trouble.
Some of these peculiar individuals find the air the most prolific source of their quarry. The whole French nation is continually looking for trouble from this source. An American in Paris who leaves a bedroom window open is warned against sore eyes, pneumonia, colds, and sudden death. If there is a window open anywhere, these suspecters of aerial mischief expect a cold, and are sure to get it. The very fear, the very anxiety, demoralizes the natural resisting power of the body and makes it susceptible.
If there is a contagious disease anywhere in the neighborhood, the trouble-expecters are sure to contract it. If one of the children coughs, or has a little too much color in the cheek, or does not feel hungry, they are certain that the dreaded disease must have begun its deadly work.
The saddest cases of all, perhaps, are those who have a fixed idea that some disease, usually supposed to be inherited, will ultimately kill them. The self-convinced victims of weak lungs, weak hearts, weak stomachs brood and dwell upon their threatened physical disasters, making them enter into every plan and calculation of life, throwing their pall over every activity of the family. All that thousands of such people need to be well and happy is a better mental state, a buoyant, hopeful attitude and the activity that would come with such a philosophy. These people are the prey of quacks of every kind, they are the “dope fiends” that swallow our millions of gallons of concoctions whose advertisements disgust the eye of every newspaper reader, they support many a fashionable physician in luxury, they make life tenfold more miserable than by any standard of right it ought to be. I wish that I had the power to stir the inmost soul of all these people to realize how much their own fate lies in the control of their own thoughts, how effort of will, by helping them to hold the healing, life-giving thought, might enable them to throw off every hampering ailment, physical and mental, and make their lives the grand expression of the divinity that is the essence of us all.
Certain people are always complaining of their hard lot and poverty. They go about with disaster written in their very faces; they are walking advertisements of their own failures, their own listless, nerveless, lifeless inactivity; they are always talking, but never doing.
I know a bright, energetic young man who has started in business for himself, but who has formed a most unfortunate habit of talking down his business to everybody. When anybody asks him how his business is getting along he says: “Poorly, poorly; no business;
