The letters of Charles Eliot Norton have lately been published, and the
time is opportune for a lesson from that good man’s life. Though always
physically frail, he lived to be over eighty, and got more out of his
life, and gave more from it, than do most robust men, even when they
have his rare degree of intellect. Some who knew him well, say that one
great secret of his long life of helpfulness and happiness was that he
never had the blues.
While men like Norton make cheerfulness a religion, many other people
of very good intentions do not even recognize it as a duty, but grope,
and drag others, through clouded lives, while the clouds are generally
of their own permitting, and not seldom of their own making. They are
often thoughtful people, but not thoughtful enough to realize how much
happiness and usefulness are wasted by the habit of the blues, or how
easily that habit can be overcome. They sometimes even indulge it from
a notion that depression of spirit is synonymous with depth of spirit,
not realizing how often black waters set up a very abysmal appearance
in a chasm so shallow that if a man clinging to the edge would only
let go, he could touch bottom without submerging his chin. But if he
delights in what he assumes to be the gloomy depths of his soul, he
does not want to let go: he wants to believe his own puddle deep, and
hates nothing worse than the possibility that it may be shallow, just
as nothing so enrages the insane as the suggestion that they are insane.
Really superior persons (without capitals or quotation marks) are
sometimes superior because of superior sensibility, though oftener, I
suspect, in spite of it; and sometimes because of superior morality.
Upon such people the shortcomings of life--especially of human nature,
weigh harder than upon common folks. It was by no means Carlyle’s
dyspepsia alone that kept him grumbling all the while, and that, but
for his sense of humor, would have killed him long before his time.
Then, too, superior people often have superior imaginations, and often
abuse them by imagining horrible things, and suffering more from them
than the clod suffers from realities.
Moreover, people with sensibilities and imaginations are apt to be
queer in their morals: they may have too few, because sensitiveness
and imagination breed passions, and are inimical to the philosophy,
as well as the plain common-sense, that regulate passions; or they
may have too many morals, because sensitiveness makes them hate the
ugly consequences of immorality worse than the rest of us can, and
also because, where Hell is in fashion, if it still is anywhere,
they imagine it so much more vividly, and shrink from it so much
more vigorously than the rest of us can, that they get New England
consciences. Worse still, that kind of superior person with too few
morals to do business with, or too many, is subject to insufficient
food and clothing, and to poor quarters and inefficient medical
care--to being sick, in short; and deprivation and sickness very
naturally bring on the blues; and last of all, sensitiveness and
imagination and too many morals and too few comforts, and sickness do
not develop a sense of humor. The poet or the tragedian in the black
frock-coat buttoned up to hide the absence of the shirt, is not half so
funny to himself as to us.
In giving so many of the reasons why people who make great and
beautiful things are apt to have the blues, I have run along the edge
of platitude, and occasionally, I fear, slipped over, because I want to
emphasize the fact that there is no warrant for the fallacy nursed by
so many would-be troubled souls, that having the blues will enable them
to make great and beautiful things, and that because Carlyle and Poe
had the blues, your or my having them is evidence that ours have the
same causes as theirs or will be accompanied by the same results.
And there are several other things tending the same way which we had
better put an end to. Depression of spirits is not as often the result
of vanity, or over-sensibility or any other form of weak wits, as it
is of weak nerves or weak liver. And yet all these weaknesses are
generally inextricably mixed as cause and effect. If without any real
cause of worry, you wake up two or three consecutive mornings feeling
that the world is an unsatisfactory place, probably you had better go
to the doctor. He won’t be apt to give you anything worse than rhubarb
and soda. You might even try them before going; and if it is a sunny
day, try to glory in it, out of doors if possible; and if it is a rainy
day, try to think how cozy it will be by the fire, or if you have to go
to an office, how good it will be to have a day for steady work, when
clients and customers are not apt to come in.
I wish I felt sure that the doctor would make you realize that we need
healthy emotional pickers and stealers just as much as we need healthy
physical ones. Overstrain and undersleep will make the world appear an
empty place, simply because the nerves won’t pick up the good things in
it. Hence the listlessness apt to follow happiness, when happiness is
great enough to fatigue. Hence people on honeymoons sometimes having
entirely baseless suspicions that they don’t love as much as they
supposed they did. Hence, too, no end of texts for temperance.
* * * * *
The bacteria of the blues of course always seize on a favorable culture
medium. Probably the best of such media is a settled and exaggerated
consciousness of the possibility of disaster, which soon becomes
magnified into a probability. Some people feel as if they were always
treading on a thin crust over a volcano. Your doctor can do a good
deal for one cause of that. The other cause is what Bacon called
defective enumeration--generalizing from the remarkable, instead of the
usual--the most frequent of all fallacies. Hundreds of people can be
killed in automobiling without your considering it more dangerous than
other sports, but as soon as somebody very near to you is killed, you
think the sport dangerous. Now as to danger in general, think of the
facts. At any moment, perhaps one person in five hundred actually is in
danger of disease or other misfortune. But the remaining four hundred
and ninety-nine are not, except in the distorted imagination of far
too large a proportion of them. There’s a big chance--perhaps one in
three or four, that you who read these lines, being a person who lives
not merely on the surface of things, are in the habit of letting your
imagination play too much with what is under the surface. Now stop it!
You _may_ of course be actually the victim of ill fortune; but even if
you are, there’s a chance that, in compensation, you have been made
a saint by it, and that you really get more out of life than do most
people more happily situated: for that’s the way of saints, as you can
tell by looking at their serene expression.
True, a few terrible disasters must be expected, but they are generally
so much like surgical operations that, unless they are fatal, the
character recovers with some of its evil elements removed. And most
strange to say, outside of character, and merely in relations to the
external world--to wealth, opportunity, friendship,--the very worst
disasters are often blessings in disguise. It pays as well to seek
for the bright side of our miseries, as it does to count our mercies.
“Count yo’ mahcies, Honey, count yo’ mahcies!” recommended the old
colored auntie. You will remember it in that shape.
I have heard one of my ink-diffusing friends confess that having had
an infirmity that interfered with his sleep, he long grieved over
it as lessening his production. But at last he realized that the
sleeplessness had enforced economy of time, in which, before the
infirmity, he had been sadly lacking, and that his waking hours, in
the undisturbed night, had bred the best of the thoughts which have
contributed to his share of fame and fortune, and to the philosophy
which secures his happiness.
But the realization of hidden blessings in misfortunes to ourselves
generally requires a long experience: so let us take a case concerning
everybody. It is not long since the civilized world experienced from
the earthquakes in Sicily and Calabria, a thrill of moral stimulus
probably the most intense it ever knew.
At first, on reading of such widespread and merciless
destruction--maiming, killing, starving, roasting of children to death
before the eyes of pinioned mothers, mothers pinioned before strong
sons also pinioned from helping; large communities destroyed, and the
survivors driven mad; horror piled on horror until the mere reader
suffers, the imagination shrinks back miserable and incapable, and the
mind loses faith in a beneficent cause and control of the universe. But
after the first intense revolt of feeling has spent itself, and the
reason attempts calmly to estimate the evil and what there may be of
resultant good, the preponderance of the good, even in such an extreme
case, may not seem impossible. The disaster evoked a universal burst of
charity that turned fleets of battleships into engines of mercy. The
moral advantage to humanity was colossal--nothing less than a distinct
injection of kindness into all the relations of men.
It involved the death of but one in hundreds of thousands of the
inhabitants of the civilized world. Most of the survivors received
distinct moral benefits, not to speak of the advantage to future
generations from the effect on the moral quality of the race.
Moreover, the case cannot be justly put without noting that the
sufferers were of a people notoriously lawless (the Northern Italians
are reported to have said: “After all, they’re nothing but Calabrians
and Sicilians”), and that the survivors received a powerful call to
righteousness.
But reason on them as we may, and get from them what moral good we
can, great tragedies tend to breed a terrible uncertainty regarding
the stability and goodness of life--and indeed of the universe and the
moral law. Yet though much uncertainty is very apt to start from great
troubles, it is by no means sure to wait for them. This skepticism is
the bottom horror. I have wondered if Sill was thinking of it when, in
his poem “Truth at Last” about the Alpine guide hurled down by the snow
slide, he asks:
Did he for just one heart-throb--did he indeed
Know with certainty, as they swept onward,
There was the end....
’Tis something if at last,
Though only for a flash, a man may see
Clear-eyed the future as he sees the past,
From doubt, or fear, or hope’s illusion free.
Did Sill mean that even death may be preferable to that haunting
uncertainty which is the worst of the blues? Early in life he had more
than his share of it, but he lived it down.
If any man can look on birds and flowers and most women and children
and some men, and upon the manifold beauties of earth and sea and
sky, from dawn on to dawn, if any man can realize that we might have
been driven by pain more effectively than even attracted by pleasure,
to feed ourselves and reproduce ourselves--if any man can see these
things, and not be certain that behind the universe there is intention,
and effective intention, to produce happiness, that man simply has, at
least temporarily, an abnormal mind. But he is the very kind of man who
gets the blues. All that can be done for him is to help him see the
other side of the shield. As for mere argument, sometimes one might
almost as well use it against paresis as against pessimism.
Neither can much be done for fools. But there are degrees and kinds of
fools. The worst are probably those who, having committed a folly of
lasting consequences, sulk over it instead of facing it cheerfully and
trying to make the best of it. When we can’t get happiness, we can at
least get discipline. But the hopeless thing about a fool is that he
can never be convinced that he is one: his follies are always in the
past tense.
Next to doubting too much, is expecting too much. Aside from the few
great disasters of a lifetime, the worst things are proverbially
those that never happen. This paper has not much to say about things
that _do_ happen. They may involve feelings not to be remonstrated
against, or even mentioned lightly. But still those feelings, often
very sacred, should, like everything else, be limited to their proper
range. The chief cause (and the chief consequence) of the blues are
_borrowed_ troubles. One of the most effective ways of borrowing them
is to take for granted that a bad situation will not right itself, and
then, instead of merely taking care of the immediate issue, letting
the imagination work at all possible issues, and devising means of
taking care of them. This is often promoted by a mistaken notion that
such constant thought over the matter is a duty--that if the worst
comes, one will at least have done one’s best. Generally one’s best
really is to drop the subject. But that is not so easy. Just as the
tongue always seeks the uneasy tooth, so the mind always seeks the
uneasy question. But the tooth is not always under control, and the
question generally is, or ought to be. Rigid discipline will develop
a habit of leaving it alone except as something can be done about it.
The true method generally is to decide what the moment admits of,
and then to await the next real occasion for decision, and meanwhile
to keep the mind occupied with other things. Usually thought between
times is worse than wasted. An occasion when it is not, is usually
not between times, but one of the times. Of course one does not want
to be taken unawares, but not a tithe of the imagined situations ever
occur, and those actually to be met are often not foreseen at all:
so most of the devising is wasted, attention is distracted from the
immediate requirements of life, and time is spent in a continuous
overshadowing of the blues. All this takes tissue, and when the next
issue comes, the power to meet it is dulled. The strength of the
great fighters--generals, lawyers, parliamentarians, depends largely
on temperaments which preserve them from such waste of their powers.
“The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man dies but one,” and
exaggerated anticipation of evil is simply cowardice.
* * * * *
Akin to doing work that never is called for, is over-refinement in
needed work. True, “perfection consists in trifles,” but don’t forget
that “trifles can’t make perfection.” There comes a point beyond which
the most conscientious workman can really do no more. Part of the
equipment of a true artist is the capacity to recognize that point.
After every essential thing is done, there remain non-essentials which
may as well go one way as the other. They raise the hardest questions,
if they are permitted to raise any, because they are as nearly balanced
as the load of Burridon’s ass. Moiling over them is threshing straw: it
leads to no result but fatigue and monomania. Monomania is generally
the first step in insanity, and nearly every step in insanity is
attended by the blues.
But objections to superfluous work and over-refined work, are not
objections to hard work, especially when one is in trouble. Carlyle
says (I quote from memory): “To him who can earnestly and truly work,
there is no need for despair.” But that advice is generally superfluous
for an American. He is more apt to need advice to play hard--to mount
his hobby or get hold of a new one, and ride it hard.
It is especially bad to let the mind run on worries at night; and to
take them to bed with one is madness. This is a special reason for
seeking society or the theatre: other people, in real life or on the
stage (better in real life, of course, because there one has to talk
back) can best pull one out of oneself when one’s own powers are
utterly inadequate. When actual causes of anxiety seem overwhelming,
if one can be made to forget them for a time, hope comes into the
ascendant.
One most important point is that worries are apt to settle themselves
during sleep. There may be a subconscious mental action, or one may
wake up with the thinking powers invigorated; but whatever the reason
may be, people go to bed in perplexity, and soon after waking, do
certainly often find that all the considerations have slipped into
their relative places, and that the perplexity has cleared.
The best of all remedies is perhaps the most difficult, though
not impossible. It is to “rise superior” to your troubles--to
convince yourself, lift yourself, force yourself into the feeling
of directorship--of competent and confident directorship of all
your affairs. Add “with God’s help” if you want to: for that may
back up our worthy intentions more even than our ancestors began to
realize--whatever they professed to believe. This feeling of calm
adequacy does much to _secure_ adequacy, and what is of perhaps more
importance, compels peace.
But adequacy is only adequacy to do the best that circumstances permit.
To attempt more than circumstances permit is at once inadequacy--to put
yourself on the weak side of a false equation. Attempt only what you
can do, and you never need fail. Yet unless you attempt the best you
can do, you do fail--fail just so far as the difference between the
actual and the best possible. But if you are reasonably brave and wise,
that difference will be slight; and the healthy conscience, like the
law, takes no account of trifles.
Shoot your arrow at the sun, and hitch your wagon to a star, all you
want to--as religious exercise; but in your daily work shoot only when
game is within range, and hitch only to something which will hold
tight, and is reasonably sure to draw.
And don’t be misled by shrewd Yankees who make divine phrases, but who
regulate their actions in daily life as cannily as other Yankees who
never make phrases at all.
Absence of work, and no less absence of play,--the mere opportunity
to brood, is dangerous to those subject to the blues. When we are in
the busy haunts of men, their activity inspires ours, and keeps our
thoughts away from introspection and baleful notions; but if we are
alone, even with Nature in her loveliest aspects, the mind is apt to
seek the profundities, and to drag the spirits with it.
Interest in this subject has brought me some confidences. I knew a man
beyond middle life, who had long longed for more opportunities of study
and meditation. At last he obtained the cherished desire in the most
desired way--in a lovely home amid the loveliest scenery. He took three
solid months of it, and found himself low-spirited, ailing, and in need
of tonics. But when he was called to the city, the first time he walked
down Fifth Avenue, he felt that he didn’t need any other tonic. Yet the
habit of years had put him, all unconsciously, in chronic need of that
one. He took it at monthly intervals, and it did its work. But it cost
time. As he approached old age, he realized in himself a tendency to
melancholy, that, in spite of the city life that had been efficacious
for himself, had given the declining years of one of his parents much
unhappiness. He was frightened: he felt that external aid, like all
tonics, must lose its effect in time; and so he worked hard to develop
powers in himself that would put him above the need of it. After a few
years, circumstances led again to three months away from the city, and
so effectually had he enlightened and trained himself that it was a
period of greater cheerfulness, health and fruitfulness than he had
ever known.
His bottom principle was: “Kill the thing at the start. Watch! As soon
as the serpent’s head shows itself through the egg, scotch it. If you
don’t, your mind will become the abode of monsters.”
* * * * *
Of course to those who believe in immortality, a faith in the ultimate
goodness of the universe is almost unescapable. Beliefs cannot be made
to order, but looked at in the most Philistine way, this one fills
so many otherwise apparent gaps in the order of the universe, saves
so many apparent wastes, changes so much chaos into kosmos, that,
when relieved of some of its absurd accompaniments from the past, the
belief seems, in the broadest view, almost a matter of course; and
the narrowing of one’s view of existence by physical death appears
absurd. The belief in immortality is such a simple and inexpensive
machine for settling bad problems that, as in the case of any simple
and inexpensive machine that throws out good results, there is a
presumption in favor of investing in it. This, I suppose, is what they
call Pragmatism. It has its dangers: for its principle is apt to be
misconstrued, and Hope tells such flattering tales! But apparently
Pragmatism has no direct business with hopes, but only with cold
hypotheses; and if one must choose between hypotheses, the preferable
one is that which strings the facts into the most orderly coherence;
and certainly without immortality, the universe is much nearer chaos
than with it.
Most of our upsets come from lack of health, or money or friends. Now
if the universe holds for us ultimately an existence where we shan’t
have to bother with such vile bodies, or such demands as they make for
money, and where we may recover all the friends we have lost here,
and if our troubles here aid in our development, as they certainly
do, the universe appears much more orderly, and our worst problems
are fairly settled. Perhaps a strong proud effective soul might not
care much for a future existence that, in such brief outline, seems
so easy; but I don’t know that our wide and exact knowledge of that
existence contains anything to indicate that in it one will not have
at least as good a chance as here to make his own way, or the way of
those he cares for; and while doing this, to make his own additions
to the gayety of nations, or their celestial equivalent. I don’t see,
either, any indication warranting any shameless, weak and impotent
soul--one like yours and mine when we have the blues--in refraining
from doing its little best here, on the ground that everything will be
made straight there, and that therefore it is just as well to wait. For
there appear more and more weaknesses in the demonstration that even
shining garments and harps and halos are to be passed around free, or
indeed that anybody will start there with anything more than he takes
with him. There does not seem, however, aught to negative the guess
already hazarded regarding health and fortune and friends--that what
capacity for winning them one does take, may have a better chance for
activity there than it has here. And as capacity improves by practice,
all this plain paragraph is an argument for doing one’s best here, and
not sitting around indulging in the blues.
I freely admit, however--most freely--that such views, especially
regarding the gayety, have not the sanction of very old or very wide
acceptance; but with the decay of Puritanism, they seem on the way to
more.
* * * * *
Before we leave old-fashioned remedies, under however new-fashioned
aspects, it may be well to consider another one that greatly helped
our ancestors--the belief in an over-ruling Providence that really
does help those who help themselves. In the form the belief was
known to them, it is not known to many of us; but we may have it in
a better form. For the narrow conception of an anthropomorphic god
constantly tinkering at the universe, we can substitute the idea
of an intelligence so great that it does not need to watch each
act, and specifically adjust each result; but has established a
law so comprehensive as to give each of our motives its legitimate
consequences--a law that in some ways rewards each of our good
intentions, even when it seems to fail, and punishes each of our evil
ones, even when it seems to succeed. Faith in such a law makes us
feel secure in spite of the haunting anxiety lest we break through
the volcano’s crust. The sparrow’s flight may be free if compensation
awaits its fall. And we may know a higher freedom and a fuller meaning,
even a creative joy, in the feeling that when we shape our acts toward
the best ends we know, we can leave the rest to a benign law that goes
deeper into motive than human gropings can, gives rewards better than
we can devise, and punishments that do not merely afflict but tend to
cure.
* * * * *
But all these faiths are another story. Faiths are good when they
are not counter to reason, and the most matter-of-fact of us act on
them every hour. But the big ones won’t come at mere bidding. What
I have been principally trying to get you to do, in case you are
subject to the blues, is to take hold and keep hold of the actual
prosaic fact that in our year and place of grace, life has reached a
fairly substantial foundation, and that throwing oneself open to every
possible attack of the blues, through a chronic feeling that life
is on a very ticklish basis, not only permits a great many needless
attacks, but goes counter to the facts--is mathematically absurd.
When you are scared, it is not because the universe is going to turn
turtle, but because you are confusing its center of gravity with your
own, and developing too much of a wrong sort of gravity above your own.
Hopefulness is really the only reasonable attitude; at worst you lose
nothing by it, unless it makes you careless.
Life is fairly reliable, and death at worst is simply nothing, while
there are growing reasons to believe that it is better than life.
And yet it is the one unfailing subject of abnormal brooding. It is
possible at any moment, inevitable at some moment; and for that very
reason it is, from most aspects, as a subject of worry, absurd at any
moment. One of the sanest and sweetest men I ever knew, who lived to be
nearly ninety, told me that he never thought of it.
Of all the humbugs of priestcraft, it is the greatest. The priests, who
once owned a third of England, and probably more than a third of Italy,
made more money out of death and its accessories than out of all the
rest of the paraphernalia in their kit. Hell and purgatory and poor
dear Dante’s scenery and properties were all part of the machinery. How
shocked Dante would have been if he had realized how he was furnishing
such ammunition! (A friend, on reading this, was surprised at my
calling Dante “dear,” because he is generally regarded as so austere
a man. To me he is not only dear, but like nearly all great geniuses,
“as a little child.”) And some four centuries later, how shocked would
have been another poet--not so poor or quite so dear, if he could
have realized what a part he was playing in the same loathsome game!
With them, one thinks of the geniuses who wrote the _Dies Irae_ and
those other wonderful hymns, and questions what they too might have
felt if they had realized all they were doing. Then come to mind some
other contributors to the humbug, who as a rule were not poor, and
were not dear at all, and who stole the sheet-iron thunder and resin
lightning--John Calvin and Cotton Mather, and so on down to some poor
dear men even so late as when the older of us were in college, who made
us get up before daylight in winter, and go and hear them pray, because
they feared that if they didn’t, and we didn’t, we should all go to
Dante’s or Milton’s or some other man’s Hell.
Well, perhaps we who have a new century to play with, especially
the younger of us, fancy among its fresh attractions a thorough
emancipation from these old superstitions. But they are in the very
blood our fathers transmitted to us. Many have had all the anti-toxic
serum needed for immunity from serious attacks, but we are all liable
to twinges--hours, perhaps days, of discomfort from that identical
disease, when we don’t know what’s the matter with us.
Fear of pain is part of the equipment of self-defense evolved in the
higher animals, but whether those below man fear death, is, I suppose,
open to question. I believe horses and sheep, at least, show fear or
aversion from the dead of their own kind. I have known it instantly
shown by a child supposed too young to know anything of the subject.
But be all that as it may, you can get far above the mere animal
instinct, up into the tender human affections like those of my dear old
friend, and find it probably true that normal creatures do not think
about death, unless some external circumstance leads them to. Yet my
old friend, with intelligence enough for the ordinary demands of life
and the most delicate of its courtesies, would not have been called
a thoughtful or imaginative man. But another dear old friend who was
both (I don’t know why I shouldn’t say that I’m thinking of Stedman),
I don’t believe ever thought much about death, except in the abstract,
unless some distinct external circumstance led him to. And he was a
very unusually normal man. On the whole, I don’t believe normal people
do think about it, in the concrete, unless they have to. Well then,
most of the thought about it in the concrete is abnormal, and in more
senses than even the priests made it, death is a humbug.
Don’t let us get the blues about it then. If we want an excuse for
them, let’s find it reasonably, in being obliged to survive when we
prefer to follow. But there are few such cases, and Time takes care of
them; and, as reasoning beings, let us realize that it is sweet and
normal that he should, and let us no more resist Time in our perverse
ways, than we would in the ways of the Egyptians.
And our ways are very perverse when they make us cling to some of the
most absurd fashions from older civilizations, and neglect the wise
ones. How long will it take us to put the Greek symbol of the lovely
youth with the inverted torch, in place of the skull and cross-bones on
the Puritan tombs? But we are coming on well when we bring forward the
symbols of love to cover grief, and put flowers with the crape outside
the door, and over the coffin. But we are not doing equally well when,
after we let a woman have a veil, or a man slink down a side street,
because they don’t want to recognize people, we, after they have got
beyond that, still compel them to keep away from people, and even from
music and the theatre, when they most need them. We can generally count
on mourners suffering enough without any aid from such fashions.
But leaving out our relations to other people, in the deepest part of
our very selves--the part that gets the blues, why have them over the
certainty of death? When we were boys, wasn’t it a good way to avoid
them before going back to school, to make the most of the last days?
Today may be the last day.
If the best way out of worry is work, don’t sit around moping about
that journey, but work. Pack up. You can’t take too much baggage--of
the right kind. There are some reasons to suspect that in the new
country you’ll find more use than you had here for all that you can get
together of learning and wisdom and aspirations and affections: love
is giving rather than receiving, you know--even to the point of giving
unrecognized. Why not there as well as here? True, your constitution
may not be up to that one-sided kind forever, but you may not have to
wait so long as that.
And even if you’re lost, baggage and all, it will not have been
wasted: for it will have done its service here, and it will not need
to be renewed. And you can’t be sure now that you won’t want it. And
how ineffably silly it is to worry over the possibility of oblivion!
That surely can’t hurt. But if anybody believes that consciousness
continues, shut up in a Pozzi-like darkness, deprived of an opportunity
to enjoy this beautiful universe or any other, _that’s_ something to
worry over. But did anybody ever invent such a Hell as that, or if
anybody did, has anybody now any justification for having the blues
over it? If you are worried by Scripture, probably you know that of the
three uses of “outer darkness” in Matthew, two plainly refer to earthly
conditions, and the third may fairly be taken in the same sense.
If you get tired packing, and need more work in view of departure,
don’t go back to moping, but get right up and put things in shape
for those you’re going to leave behind. But don’t bother them, or do
foolish things. One of the best things about that journey is that
nearly all the wise preparations for staying here are equally wise
for going. So you would be foolish to make very many _specific_
preparations for going. In fact specific preparations for that journey
have involved more of the waste and tomfoolery of the world than almost
anything else--perhaps more than even war or fashion.
But be ready to go when you’re called.
Meantime circumstances may be so against you that you can’t have a
happy life; but probably you can, if you so will, have at least a
cheerful one, and those who have had the experience say that it’s
pretty hard to tell the difference--that they amount to about the
same thing, except that, on the whole, the cheerful life is the more
effective; and that, at best, happiness is but a by-product.
All this simple advice may be easier to follow than you think, and if
you do follow it, probably you won’t have the blues.