Part 5

Then, in quick response to this thought, the Voice again spoke:-

“When you make the effort! It is the you inside that must make the effort.”

And I finally came into this understanding.

I want to impress the fact that I did not learn at once all the things I am now telling. This knowledge grew. But I’m going to state some things before I go on to tell of how I found my life’s big opportunity.

I gained the understanding that old age is a matter of the ignorance of Life. New laws of Nature are continually being discovered. In the last century science discovered electricity. This century will see the discovery of Life.

Man has both the mental and physical power to keep young, if he will use that power. Instead of being a thing on the dump-heap, man may grow in power as he grows in years. His body is made by food, drink, air, and thoughts. Its cells are constantly rebuilding. By understanding his own power, he can direct this rebuilding to an increased Life-capacity.

His power to do so has been limited by his own ignorance. Once men said that there could never be a steam-engine. Later they scoffed at the possibility of building a flying machine. In his discovery of new laws, man is learning that he has hindered his own growth through his lack of understanding. A man can never grow old. He may stop growing, and stagnate. That is what I had done.

The first lesson that I had to learn was the difference between youth and old age. Both are really matters of the spirit, rather than of years. One may be aged at twenty, and a youth at eighty.

The spirit of youth has courage, is venturesome, progressive, optimistic, creative. The spirit of old age is afraid, reactionary, pessimistic, and stagnant. Youth laughs. Old age sighs. Youth is eager to discover new paths. Old age wants to stay in the prison of habit and travel the same old ruts.

I had been traveling in ruts. And I had worn them deep. For twenty years I had let myself live in the same old dark apartment, and take the same old route to the same old printing-plant. And I had wanted to cling to the same old ways of doing work. The time came when I realized that I must have been something of a proposition to the printing-plant’s young management. For I had stubbornly opposed the new efficiency system.

Because I felt tired at night, I had let my wife give up all other associations to keep me company. I had let myself lose interest in my old friends, and I had shunned making new ones. I selfishly clung to just my own immediate family. That meant heart-stagnation. The man is old who has let himself lose his heart-interest in people.

The man who loves most, lives most. Youth loves.

I had let myself drop out of touch with all the big public issues. I felt no interest in any country but the United States, and that meant very little to me outside of New York City. And here in New York, where every opportunity offered, I never went to a lecture, or to a concert. I had stopped going to see the new plays; I talked about the superior old days of the theatre, when Daly’s was in its prime. I didn’t even read the new books, but prided myself on sticking to the old ones. All of which made for brain-stagnation.

I had grown afraid of adventure.

This revelation came to me suddenly, the next day after my first experience with the Voice. It sent a tingle of protest through me, and I cringed with something like shame. But I halted on the sidewalk and faced the fact squarely. Then I rebelliously pulled myself together, quit my hunt for a job, forgot my poverty-stricken bank-account, and went for a trip through Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum. I had not been there for years. It all seemed like a new world to me. It stirred my stagnant emotions and filled me with new interests.

We are continually losing these life-building values that lie right at our elbow. A man will travel the same old route day after day to his business. If, once in a while, he would go even a block out of his way, he might have the feeling of new adventure-get a new view, or some experience to stimulate new cell-activity in his stagnating heart and brain.

When I got home that night, I was several years younger.

Having conquered my fears and tasted adventure, I was hungry now for more. My wife felt the change in me when I saw her that evening in Brooklyn. In fact, she has always declared that it was the influence which I brought into the house that night-the feeling of new vigor and of new hope-that made George take a turn for the better and get well.

As usual, on my Brooklyn subway trip, I read the want advertisements in the evening papers. An office over in a small New Jersey town was advertising for a printer! I read it two or three times. But if I had not taken that Central Park adventure trip, I don’t believe I should have answered this advertisement. I had never thought of going to New Jersey to look for a job. I felt all the self-centred New Yorker’s prejudices against New Jersey. But I did go. I was up and on my way early the next morning.

And that was how I happened to meet Ben Hutchins and find my life’s big opportunity.

The first time I saw Ben Hutchins, I laughed. I knew at once that he was a crank. He was an old-school printer, like myself. For years he had run this little job office and published a weekly newspaper. Afterwards, I learned that he had plenty of money-was, in fact, rich-and that the only reason he kept on publishing his paper was that he didn’t quite know how to get out of the habit.

His little old one-story building stood off by itself, in the business section of this small New Jersey town. To get to it, you had to cross a bridge and follow a narrow dirt path. The path this morning was muddy, after a short flurry of wet snow. The paint was worn off the building. One of the old-fashioned shutters was loose and flapped in the November wind. On the roof was a rooster weather-vane that looked as if it might have been crowing into the teeth of a half-century of storms.

I opened the door and went in. It was one large room-a typical, old-fashioned, country-newspaper office. Its assortment of junk looked as if it might have been accumulating there since the American Revolution. An antiquated roll-topped desk stood in the corner, by one of the front windows. A tipsy old swivel-chair stood in front of it. Near it, a lop-sided old waste-basket spilled its overload of newspapers on the floor. In the centre of the room a rusty base-burner stove glowed with a red-hot coal fire.

Ben Hutchins, in his shirt-sleeves, and wearing a printer’s dirty apron, stood in front of one of the cases, setting type. He was a stockily built man of about seventy, with a belligerent shock of gray hair that stood up straight on his head.

When I entered, he waited to space out a line before recognizing my presence. Then he turned and glowered at me over his glasses, which hung on the tip of his bulbous nose.

“Well-?” he said, finally, after a critical sniff.

Then, as I said, I laughed-a laugh born of my feeling of new confidence, gained from the teachings of the Voice. It caught Ben Hutchins’s interest and made him take a liking to me from the start. I have learned that he is very quick and very decided in his likes and dislikes. In fact, he never does anything half-way. He is either stubbornly for a thing or against it. No argument can ever convince him either way. And down under all his surface peculiarities he has a keen and most original sense of humor. It was the liking that he conceived for me from the start which made him let me do the things that I have done.

He gave me again the once-over; then he, too, indulged in a faint grin.