Part 4

We may learn from nature's rhythm of life that we need both society and solitude. To adjust these to each other in proper degree is a problem for each of us. Are you one of the unfortunate persons who cannot be happy for a moment unless in the company of others? If so, you are preparing an unhappy future. If you find yourself so dull a companion, how can you expect others to find you interesting? You are not developing the resources without which no life can be permanently happy. Give yourself occasionally an opportunity to think your own thoughts, to question your own heart, and to get acquainted with yourself. You will be all the better a companion to others for it, and, moreover, you will be better company for yourself, for you will be led to develop inner resources. I once heard an Indian Buddhist priest tell of the custom in his country of requiring each child in a family to spend one hour a day quietly in a room by himself, "thinking good thoughts." An hour a day so spent by some young people I know would be helpful in arousing to greater independence of mind and originality of thought.

Some of us, however, need to make serious effort to acquire the power of entering easily into cordial relations with others. If you have a tendency to hold aloof, if you are not at your ease with those with whom you happen to be thrown, and find it difficult to enter into friendly relations with them, set yourself earnestly to correct this defect. Such tendencies allowed to go unchecked are almost sure to result in many lonely hours.

Meditation without action makes dreamers. Constant activity without reflection means a loss of the intellectual grasp of things. Jesus, after a day of the most active ministry, usually sought the loneliness of the mountains and there found strength for the work of the following day. So, on one day in seven, our busy, hurrying tasks cease, and we have a day for rest and worship. Let us do all we can to guard Sunday against the dangers that threaten it and that would make it exactly like all other days. To say nothing of its religious uses, the rhythm of life demands that one day in the week be given to rest and to thoughts and interests far removed from those of our busy work-days. Some one has said that Sunday should be _joyous_ (unlike the Sunday of the Puritans), _different_, that is, different from the other days of the week, and _uplifting_.

Not until we have passed out of early youth are we likely to comprehend the fact that life itself has tidal times. A mood of exaltation is likely to be followed by one of depression. Life waxes and wanes; it does not stand still. We learn to take ourselves at our best and to be patient with ourselves at our worst. When faith and courage are low, we come to know that soon they will return in all their strength. Doubt of self and one's powers will be followed by self-confidence. Thus we learn never to make important decisions or to begin new and weighty enterprises at ebb tide. There is, in another sense from that which Shakespeare meant, "a tide in the affairs of men" which should be seized.

Work and play are both essential in the healthy life. We know the result of "all work and no play." Even good, wholesome, congenial work makes us dull if it is never relieved and brightened by recreation. Many a faithful worker has broken down under the strain of unremitting toil, who might have doubled or trebled his years of usefulness if a little play could have been mingled with the work.

To one who plays all the time, that is, who has no work in life, play soon becomes stale and wearisome. After the period of childhood is passed, when play should be the main business of life, it seems to be an inexorable law of nature that those who will not work shall not play. Have you ever visited any of the great winter resorts of the South? If so you have noticed that they are filled largely with people who have no pursuit in life except that of having a good time. While the world's work is being done by others, they lead a butterfly existence. What wonder that they wear a discontented look! Everywhere they seek for happiness and wonder why they fail to find the elusive creature. It would not be difficult to tell them. Those who refuse to do the world's work are denied a share in its play, and thus does Nature assert the supremacy of her laws.

No people in the world have so good a time when they play as those who work hard--if they also know how to play well. Self-denial, waiting, and anticipation give a zest to pleasure that can come in no other way. In one of Charles Lamb's essays he speaks of the keen delight which he and his sister took, during the days when toil was unceasing and income small, on the rare occasions when they could afford to go to the theater. The poorest seats amply satisfied their desires, and it seemed to them that no one in the house was so happy as they. "Could those good old one-shilling gallery days return, could you and I be once more struggling up those inconvenient staircases, pushed about and squeezed and elbowed by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers, I would be willing to bury more wealth than Croesus had to purchase it."

The woman who gives herself up wholly to a society life never finds happiness in that life; but let her make something really worth while her main object, whether it be bringing up a family, writing books, or working in a settlement, and her social pleasures will then give her relaxation and delight. It is the student who works hard and who feels the glow of accomplishment who can put most zest into a game on the athletic field.

Our country probably has more workers than any other who do not take enough time to play. It is so easy for our earnest, energetic people to fall into this habit. Work is sweet and we think we cannot have too much of it. Sometimes, too, we get an exaggerated idea of our own importance. We think that if we stop work for a moment all the wheels of progress will stand still. Never did any people feel the intensity of life as we Americans of this generation do. We have heard the gospel of efficiency preached on every hand, but we have not often been told how to maintain a high level of efficiency for a long period. Those who are efficient, and at the same time willing, invariably have more put upon them than they can do. In addition to legitimate work, there is auxiliary work of various kinds. Committee meetings and other services for the general good consume for many of us a great deal of time. So we keep chasing duties and go to bed every night plagued by the host that we have left undone.

Yet, shall we regret that we live in an age of opportunity? If we are counted among the efficient, who are given a large share of work to do, shall we be sorry? On the contrary, let us remember that more to be pitied than any one else is the person who, because he has no work in life, is obliged to hunt for occupation.

The real trouble is that most of us do not know the secret of economizing our time and strength. Let us ask what the rhythm of life demands of us. No one is capable of incessant toil without serious damage. Our highest good demands that there shall be constant alternation of labor and rest, or work and play. Some forms of work are play because they involve different powers of mind and body from our regular work. Many a scholar has studied until his eyes were dimmed and his mind dulled only to find that he had himself defeated his own purpose. Many a business man has given himself no rest until increasing inefficiency compelled it. It is not the teacher who makes a practice of working late into the night, with never a moment for play, who makes the inspiring classroom instructor.

Some one has given this recipe for a happy life: "Work, play, study, laugh; have a job and a hobby." Play should be regarded as a legitimate part of the business of life. Duty has been only half performed when happy recreation has been left out.

The wise student has, all through a hard term's work, preserved the balance between work and play, society and solitude. Unless she has been particularly unfortunate she has come to the end of the term only healthily tired. By that I mean the kind of weariness from which recuperation is rapid and easy. She has not overdrawn her physical bank account. She has not run in debt to the future. Beware of any weariness of which that cannot be said.

The daily life of work and play for all of us ought to be so adjusted that each day's strength is sufficient for each day's needs. Wherever the conditions of work and play and of health are right, this is true. But school life, both for teachers and pupils, involves an unusual amount of wear and tear on the nervous system, and hence we should be more careful than others, industrial workers, for example, to see that this strain never becomes unduly severe. Few teachers or students could stand fifty weeks of school work in a year, an amount which in many occupations is accepted as a matter of course. That is the reason we have so many vacations. When vacation comes, then, let us realize its need, and its purpose; namely, to restore the balance of body and mind by allowing the beneficent restorative processes of Nature to do their work upon us; and let us coöperate heartily with these forces. Some do not do this, but hinder Nature instead of helping her. Some go home for a three weeks' vacation and spend the entire time in a whirl of social dissipation. Ask yourself whether that restores your powers so that you return to your work with mind and body at their best? We rest, not for the sake of resting, but that we may work better. Vacations are given to restore the balance of life, not to destroy it.

And some students carry all their school worries and responsibilities with them into vacation. They dream of their work by night and think of it by day. They count up all the lessons that must be learned and all the themes that must be written, as if there would not be a day in which to do each day's work. "Take no thought [worry] for the things of the morrow, for the morrow will take thought for the things of itself."

And yet, when the long summer vacation comes, I wonder if even a young student is justified in using it _all_ for play. We older people, if we are doing a work in the world which we consider worth while, take an entire summer for play but rarely. The reason is that life is too short for all one wants to learn or to accomplish, and so each long vacation must see the fulfillment of some of the tasks which we have set for ourselves. For the student there is a middle ground between working at school tasks all summer and idling during the entire time. Remember that a change of occupation is one form of rest. If a portion of each bountiful summer vacation were spent in learning something quite worth while, yet different from the ordinary school tasks, work and play would each profit from the other.

Have you sometimes been disturbed because you did not feel just like beginning hard work at the close of a vacation? Do not let that trouble you. I have learned to distrust a vacation at the close of which I find myself wearing the harness too easily. We get the most out of a vacation by making it as different as possible from our regular work. The more different it has been, the more difficult it is to get the mind back into the usual channels.

When the process of "getting up steam" is over, and we settle down to steady work after a good vacation, the sensation is one of the most delightful I know. Here is an opportunity to begin life all over again, and by retrieving the mistakes of the past, to make the future worthier. As the weeks stretch out ahead of us, they loom up big with opportunity and privilege. Start home for your next vacation, then, with a resolution in your heart that you will so spend it that when it is over, this new outlook upon life and work shall be yours; for the chief purpose of a vacation is to restore the rhythm of life.

VI

THE USES OF TROUBLE

"Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids not sit nor stand but go!"

You read these familiar words of Browning, but you do not believe them. There must be trouble in the world, you say. There must be rebuffs and stings and hardness, and they must be endured; but as to finding good in such things--why pretend it?

But why talk to young people about trouble? It is well that the mind should be filled with happiness and hope, yet to ignore the other and darker side of life does not abolish it. The question of the place of adversity in life is one that has occupied thinking minds ever since the world began; and since no one can hope to escape the common lot it is well to get ready for trouble before it comes. Young people are really no less interested than their elders in serious subjects. They care for the deeper things of life and they long to understand them.

One must be very young, indeed, not to have had some hard experience of one's own, some disappointment or struggle or sorrow. Sometimes these are troubles that are apparent to all, and our hearts go out in sympathy and in a yearning desire to comfort. Sometimes they are kept close shut from others. "The heart knoweth its own bitterness." If you have never been called to go through deep waters yourself, perhaps you have had to stand by and suffer in sympathy while some one you loved has done so.

Moreover, youth has its own disappointments, its own griefs and sorrows to bear, often unguessed by those who are older. Did you believe that the world was all goodness, and have you suffered the shock that comes to every sensitive soul upon discovering that it is a very bad as well as a very good world? How can God be in his heaven and all right with the world, when there is so much sorrow and suffering and sin? It takes a long time to think these problems out, and their solution in full comes only with the "years that bring the philosophic mind." For some it never comes.

Have you lost faith in some one whom you trusted, and are you therefore having a struggle lest you lose all faith in human nature? Or do you distrust yourself and your own powers? While longing with passionate earnestness to be of use to the world, are you standing on the threshold of life all uncertain what place there may be for you or whether there may be any? To all these perplexities often are added religious doubts. One does not know what one may believe and wonders if one may believe anything. Many young people, in their process of adjustment to real life, pass through an experience no less serious than the going down into the "Everlasting No," described by Carlyle. Many of the interests and the beliefs of childhood are outgrown, while those of mature manhood or womanhood have not yet taken their place and the soul seems adrift. We who are older seldom appreciate either the seriousness or the sacredness of such experiences in the young. One reason why these are often so tragic is that youth lacks the perspective for judging them. There are as yet no long memories. One believes that what is now will always be. There is no remembrance of the conquest of past difficulties by which to judge the present.

So much to show that life is not all sunshine even when we are twenty! But these experiences, tragic as they seem at the time, will, if nobly lived through, bring their own compensation in truer self-knowledge and greater depth and earnestness of character. We learn from them, too, the necessity for readjustment. We learn to adapt ourselves to the real world in which we find ourselves instead of to the unreal world of our dreams.

"I slept and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke and found that life was duty."

This process of readjustment involves the reconciling of the two, the discovery that the life of duty to which we wake is at the same time the life of beauty of which we dreamed.

In this process of readjustment, the first thing to learn is that it is not necessary that we should have everything we want. Indeed, it is not necessary that we should be happy. As soon as we recognize that fact we are on the way to happiness. How many spoiled children of indulgent parents there are who do not learn this except through some unhappy experience! How many such have I watched with interest and sympathy when the idea first dawned upon their minds that, perhaps, after all, life was not going to bring them everything they demanded! Their pitifully narrow and selfish ideas must be uprooted and broad and generous ideas must take their place before even a beginning will have been made toward a fruitful life. In a world where none of us can have just what we want, where no life is ever carried out exactly as planned, and where any day may rob us of what we have cherished most, it behooves us to form early in life the habit of making the most of whatever comes our way. Of nothing is this more true than of those things we do not welcome, that seem hard and forbidding. Usually they are not what they seem, but are friends in disguise, as Browning tells us.

There are many kinds of trouble, and, of course, some kinds are harder to bear than others. Hardships and rebuffs might rank as the easiest. Loss of money or material possessions is not as serious as at first it seems. Grief is much more difficult to bear. Yet of whatever kind or degree the adversities of life, it is probable that each, as Shakespeare puts it, wears a precious jewel in its head.

There are several ways of meeting trouble. One wrong way is to regard it in a spirit of rebellion, and by constant brooding over what might have been, to allow it to embitter and spoil life. We have all known people who went through life meeting trouble in this way.

Another and a better way to meet trouble is with stoical resignation. This does undoubtedly bring strength, but it does not bring sweetness. One has not really gained the victory unless he goes further.

There is something better than to quarrel with trouble and there is something better than merely to endure it, and that is to compel it, before we are through with it, to do us good, even as Jacob wrested a blessing from the angel. It is natural to think that our troubles only restrict and limit; but we may find even in the most overwhelming disaster that which enriches life. That is the reason it so often happens that one who has known the depths of sorrow is a tower of strength upon whom others may lean, or a well of comfort and inspiration from which they may draw. Nothing has yet been discovered so good for the development of character as struggle. Deep human sympathy and the power to enter into the sorrows of others are born of suffering.

Have you not known some wealthy family whose riches suddenly took wings, to the enormous gain of every one of its members? Sons, whose lives of luxurious ease were rapidly hurrying them along the road to ruin are now forced to become self-supporting and thus acquire those manly virtues which before had been wanting. Daughters, obliged to shoulder some of the responsibilities of life and plan for others instead of for their own selfish pleasure, are made strong and womanly.

To be stricken by an incurable disease would seem to be the worst misfortune that could befall any human being. Yet, if so, why is it that invalids are so often the sunniest, most serene, most stimulating persons we know? I have chanced to be acquainted with several such in my life to whom I would go if in need of a word of encouragement or inspiration. All the disappointment in the failure of life's plans, all the suffering and pain have been transmuted into character. If, after all, the chief purpose of life is the making of character, we need not be so concerned over the means. It is for us to take the material provided, and with the means given to accomplish a worthy result. "Life is the raw material," says Goethe, "and man the artist who is to shape it into a thing of beauty."

I know a lady who lost in quick succession all her children. She might have become hard and bitter, crying out against the injustice that took her children while other happy mothers are surrounded by their little ones. Instead she became an angel of mercy to all the needy children within her reach. By her efficient work for pure-milk laws, better sanitary conditions, vacation playgrounds, and free kindergartens, she doubtless prevented many other mothers from having to mourn as she mourned. She is gentler, kindlier, more loving, more unselfish than before her great sorrow came to her, and her life is probably of much more value to the world than it would have been otherwise. She transmuted her sorrow into unselfish service. "When He hath tried me I shall come forth as gold."

Why trouble comes to us and why it comes in the forms it does, he must be a very wise person who presumes to say. One of the world-poets of old wrote a great poem upon the problem of suffering. Yet Job did not find out why God sent trouble to him, though he learned that it was not sent as a punishment. He also learned what his attitude should be toward it and in what spirit he should bear it. And for us, too, it is far more important that we should meet trouble in the right way than that we should know why it comes. Are you carrying some burden or bearing some cross that often seems too heavy? And do you sometimes feel rebellious about it and contrast your lot with that of some one who has no such cross to bear? That is unworthy of your best self, as you well know. It is for you to see to it that this trouble, whatever it may be, not only does not spoil your character and your life, but that it enriches both. It is, perhaps, the best means you will ever have to acquire certain qualities which you need and which, perhaps, you greatly admire in others. By this trial you are being tested. By the way you endure it will all your future life be determined. It is your part to become, not in spite of this burden, but because of it, a larger person than you were before.

An insight into some of the immutable laws of life helps us to endure hard things. No law is probably more steadfast than the law of compensation, as Emerson clearly shows us in his remarkable essay on that subject, an essay which should be read by every young person who is trying to formulate a philosophy of life. "For everything you miss you gain something else, and for everything you gain you lose something." When you are obliged to give up some cherished project or dear ambition, try to discover what you received in its place.

Perhaps you long to be a musician, an artist, or a scholar, and perhaps certain duties and obligations life has created for you prevent the fulfillment of this cherished dream. Then find your self-realization in those things which are permitted you. "What we need is not so much to realize the ideal as to idealize the real." Nothing so rapidly develops character in a young person as the shouldering of responsibility. While one of your friends may have been perfecting herself in music or art, or broadening herself by foreign travel, you have been carrying heavy burdens for others. Has it, therefore, been all loss to you and all gain to her? Far from it. Instead, she has gained one thing, you another. Most of us do not receive more than our share in life. You will be surprised if you look about you to discover how true this is. Apply the test to your friends and acquaintances one by one, and you will see that the advantages of each are more or less counterbalanced by the disadvantages, so that things are by no means so unjustly arranged as it would at first seem.