Part 6

Syndicating Our Sorrows

The most selfish man in the world is the one who is most unselfish,—with his sorrows. He does not leave a single misery of his untold to you, or unsuffered by you,—he gives you all of them. The world becomes to him a syndicate formed to take stock in his private cares, worries and trials. His mistake is in forming a syndicate; he should organize a trust and control it all himself, then he could keep everyone from getting any of his misery.

Life is a great, serious problem for the individual. All our greatest joys and our deepest sorrows come to us,—alone. We must go into our Gethsemane,—alone. We must battle against the mighty weakness within us,—alone. We must live our own life,—alone. We must die,—alone. We must accept the full responsibility of our life,—alone. If each one of us has this mighty problem of life to solve for himself, if each of us has his own cares, responsibilities, failures, doubts, fears, bereavements, we surely are playing a coward’s part when we syndicate our sorrows to others.

We should seek to make life brighter for others; we should seek to hearten them in their trials by the example of our courage in bearing our sorrows. We should seek to forget our failures, and remember only the new wisdom they gave us; we should live down our griefs by counting the joys and privileges still left to us; put behind us our worries and regrets, and face each new day of life as bravely as we can. But we have no right to retail our sorrow and unhappiness through the community.

Autobiography constitutes a large part of the conversation of some people. It is not really conversation,—it is an uninterrupted monologue. These people study their individual lives with a microscope, and then they throw an enlarged view of their miseries on a screen and lecture on them, as a stereopticon man discourses on the microbes in a drop of water. They tell you that “they did not sleep a wink all night; they heard the clock strike every quarter of an hour.” Now, there is no real cause for thus boasting of insomnia. It requires no peculiar talent,—even though it does come only to wide-awake people.

If you ask such a man how he is feeling, he will trace the whole genealogy of his present condition down from the time he had the grippe four years ago. You hoped for a word; he gives you a treatise. You asked for a sentence; he delivers an encyclopedia. His motto is: “Every man his own Boswell.” He is syndicating his sorrows.

The woman who makes her trials with her children, her troubles with her servants, her difficulties with her family, the subjects of conversation with her callers is syndicating her sorrows. If she has a dear little innocent child who recites “Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night,” is it not wiser for the mother to bear it calmly and discreetly and in silence, than to syndicate this sorrow?

The business man who lets his dyspepsia get into his disposition, and who makes everyone around him suffer because he himself is ill, is syndicating ill-health. We have no right to make others the victims of our moods. If illness makes us cross and irritable, makes us unjust to faithful workers who cannot protest, let us quarantine ourselves so that we do not spread the contagion. Let us force ourselves to speak slowly, to keep anger away from the eyes, to prevent temper showing in the voice. If we feel that we must have dyspepsia, let us keep it out of our head, let us keep it from getting north of the neck.

Most people sympathize too much with themselves. They take themselves as a single sentence isolated from the great text of life. They study themselves too much as separated from the rest of humanity, instead of being vitally connected with their fellow-men. There are some people who surrender to sorrow as others give way to dissipation. There is a vain pride of sorrow as well as of beauty. Most individuals have a strange glow of vanity in looking back upon their past and feeling that few others in life have suffered such trials, hardships and disappointments as have come to them.

When Death comes into the little circle of loved ones who make up our world, all life becomes dark to us. We seem to have no reason for existing, no object, no incentive, no hope. The love that made struggle and effort bearable for us,—is gone. We stare, dry-eyed, into the future, and see no future; we want none. Life has become to us a past,—with no future. It is but a memory, without a hope.

Then in the divine mystery of Nature’s processes, under the tender, soothing touch of Time, as days melt into weeks, we begin to open our eyes gently to the world around us, and the noise and tumult of life jars less and less upon us. We have become emotionally convalescent. As the days go on, in our deep love, in the fullness of our loyalty, we protest often, with tears in our eyes, against our gradual return to the spirit and atmosphere of the days of the past. We feel in a subtle way a new pain, as if we were disloyal to the dear one, as if we were faithless to our love. Nature sweetly turns aside our protesting hands, and says to us, “There is no disloyalty in permitting the wounds to lessen their pain, to heal gradually, if Time foreordain that they can heal.” There are some natures, all-absorbed in a mighty love, wherein no healing is possible,—but these are rare souls in life.

Bitter though our anguish be, we have no right to syndicate our sorrow. We have no right to cast a gloom over happy natures by our heavy weight of crape, by serving the term prescribed by Society for wearing the livery of mourning,—as if real grief thought of a uniform. We have no right to syndicate our grief by using notepaper with a heavy black border as wide as a hatband, thus parading our personal sorrow to others in their happiest moments.

If life has not gone well with us, if fortune has left us disconsolate, if love has grown cold, and we sit alone by the embers; if life has become to us a valley of desolation, through which weary limbs must drag an unwilling body till the end shall come,—let us not radiate such an atmosphere to those round us; let us not take strangers through the catacombs of our life, and show the bones of our dead past; let us not pass our cup of sorrow to others, but, if we must drink it, let us take it as Socrates did his poison hemlock,—grandly, heroically and uncomplainingly.

If your life has led you to doubt the existence of honor in man and virtue in woman; if you feel that religion is a pretense, that spirituality is a sham, that life is a failure, and death the entrance to nothingness; if you have absorbed all the poison philosophy of the world’s pessimists, and committed the folly of believing it,—don’t syndicate it.

If your fellow-man be clinging to one frail spar, the last remnant of a noble, shipwrecked faith in God and humanity, let him keep it. Do not loosen his fingers from his hope, and tell him it is a delusion. How do you know? Who told you it was so?

If these high-tide moments of life sweep your faith in Omnipotence into nothingness, if the friend in whom you have put all faith in humanity and humanity’s God betray you, do not eagerly accept the teachings of those modern freethinkers who syndicate their infidelity at so much per reserved seat. Seek to recover your lost faith by listening to the million voices that speak of infinite wisdom, infinite love, that manifest themselves in nature and humanity, and then build up as rapidly as you can a new faith, a faith in something higher, better and truer than you have known before.

You may have one in the world to whom you may dare show with the fullness of absolute confidence and perfect faith any thought, any hope, any sorrow,—but you dare not trust them to the world. Do not show the world through your Bluebeard chamber; keep your trials and sorrows as close to you as you can till you have mastered them. Don’t weaken others by thus—syndicating your miseries.

The Revelations of Reserve Power

Every individual is a marvel of unknown and unrealized possibilities. Nine-tenths of an iceberg is always below water. Nine-tenths of the possibilities of good and evil of the individual is ever hidden from his sight.

Burns’ prayer,—that we might “see oursels as ithers see us,”—was weak. The answer could minister only to man’s vanity,—it would show him only what others think him to be, not what he is. We should pray to see ourselves as we are. But no man could face the radiant revelation of the latent powers and forces within him, underlying the weak, narrow life he is living. He would fall blinded and prostrate as did Moses before the burning bush. Man is not a mechanical music-box wound up by the Creator and set to play a fixed number of prescribed tunes. He is a human harp, with infinite possibilities of unawakened music.

The untold revelations of Nature are in her Reserve Power. Reserve Power is Nature’s method of meeting emergencies. Nature is wise and economic. Nature saves energy and effort, and gives only what is absolutely necessary for life and development under any given condition, and when new needs arise Nature always meets them by her Reserve Power.

In animal life Nature reveals this in a million phases. Animals placed in the darkness of the Mammoth Cave gradually have the sense of sight weakened and the senses of smell, touch and hearing intensified. Nature watches over all animals, making their color harmonize with the general tone of their surroundings to protect them from their enemies. Those arctic animals which in the summer inhabit regions free from snow, turn white when winter comes. In the desert, the lion, the camel and all the desert antelopes have more or less the color of the sand and rocks among which they live. In tropical forests parrots are usually green; turacous, barbets and bee-eaters have a preponderance of green in their plumage. The colors change as the habits of the animals change from generation to generation. Nature, by her Reserve Power, always meets the new needs of animals with new strength,—new harmony with new conditions.

About forty-five years ago three pairs of enterprising rabbits were introduced into Australia. To-day, the increase of these six immigrants may be counted by millions. They became a pest to the country. Fortunes have been spent to exterminate them. Wire fences many feet high and thousands of miles long have been built to keep out the invaders. The rabbits had to fight awful odds to live, but they have now outwitted man. They have developed a new nail,—a long nail by which they can retain their hold on the fence while climbing. With this same nail they can burrow six or eight inches under the netting, and thus enter the fields that mean food and life to them. They are now laughing at man. Reserve Power has vitalized for these rabbits latent possibilities because they did not tamely accept their condition, but in their struggle to live learned how to live.

In plant life, Nature is constantly revealing Reserve Power. The possibilities of almost infinite color are present in every green plant, even in roots and stems. Proper conditions only are needed to reveal them. By obeying Nature’s laws man could make leaves as beautifully colored as flowers. The wild rose has only a single corolla; but, when cultivated in rich soil, the numerous yellow stamens change into the brilliant red leaves of the full-grown cabbage-rose. This is but one of Nature’s miracles of Reserve Power. Once the banana was a tropical lily; the peach was at one time a bitter almond. To tell the full story of Reserve Power in Nature would mean to write the history of the universe, in a thousand volumes.

Nature is a great believer in “double engines.” Man is equipped with nearly every organ in duplicate—eyes, ears, lungs, arms and legs, so that if one be weakened, its mate, through Reserve Power, is stimulated to do enough for both. Even where the organ itself is not duplicated, as in the nose, there is a division of parts so there is constant reserve. Nature, for still further protection, has for every part of the body an understudy in training, to be ready in a crisis,—as the sense of touch for the blind.

Birds when frightened ruffle their feathers; a dog that has been in the water shakes its coat so that each hair stands out of itself; the startled hedgehog projects every quill. These actions are produced by “skin muscles” that are rudimentary in man, and over which in ordinary conditions he has no control. But in a moment of terrible fear Reserve Power quickens their action in a second, and the hair on his head “stands on end” in the intensity of his fright.

Nature, that thus watches so tenderly over the physical needs of man, is equally provident in storing for him a mental and a moral Reserve Power. Man may fail in a dozen different lines of activity and then succeed brilliantly in a phase wherein he was unconscious of any ability. We must never rest content with what we are, and say: “There is no use for me to try. I can never be great. I am not even clever now.” But the law of Reserve Power stands by us as a fairy godmother and says: “There is one charm by which you can transmute the dull dross of your present condition into the pure gold of strength and power,—that charm is ever doing your best, ever daring more, and the full measure of your final attainment can never be told in advance. Rely upon me to help you with new revelations of strength in new emergencies. Never be cast down because your power seems so trifling, your progress so slow. The world’s greatest and best men were failures in some line, failures many times before failure was crowned with success.”

There is in the mythology of the Norsemen a belief that the strength of an enemy we kill enters into us. This is true in character. As we conquer a passion, a thought, a feeling, a desire; as we rise superior to some impulse, the strength of that victory, trifling though it may be, is stored by Nature as a Reserve Power to come to us in the hour of our need.