Living in an air-castle is about as profitable as owning a
half-interest in a rainbow. It is no more nourishing than a dinner
of twelve courses—eaten in a dream. Air-castles are built of golden
moments of time, and their only value is in the raw material thus
rendered valueless.
The atmosphere of air-castles is heavy and stupefying with the incense
of vague hopes and phantom ideals. In them man lulls himself into
dreaming inactivity with the songs of the mighty deeds he is going to
do, the great influence he some day will have, the vast wealth that
will be his, sometime, somehow, somewhere, in the rosy, sunlit days
of the future. The architectural error about air-castles is that the
owner builds them _downward_ from their gilded turrets in the clouds,
instead of _upward_ from a solid, firm foundation of purpose and
energy. This diet of mental lotus-leaves is a mental narcotic, not a
stimulant.
Ambition, when wedded to tireless energy is a great thing and a good
thing, but in itself it amounts to little. Man cannot raise himself to
higher things by what he would like to accomplish, but only by what
he endeavors to accomplish. To be of value, ambition must ever be
made manifest in zeal, in determination, in energy consecrated to an
ideal. If it be thus reinforced, thus combined, the thin airy castle
melts into nothingness, and the individual stands on a new strong
foundation of solid rock, whereon, day by day and stone by stone, he
can rear a mighty material structure of life-work to last through time
and eternity. The air-castle ever represents the work of an architect
without a builder; it means plans never put into execution. They tell
us that man is the architect of his own fortunes. But if he be merely
architect he will make only an air-castle of his life; he should be
architect and builder too.
Living in the future is living in an air-castle. To-morrow is the grave
where the dreams of the dreamer, the toiler who toils not, are buried.
The man who says he will lead a newer and better life to-morrow, who
promises great things for the future, and yet does nothing in the
present to make that future possible, is living in an air-castle. In
his arrogance he is attempting to perform a miracle; he is seeking to
turn water into wine, to have harvest without seed-time, to have an end
without a beginning.
If we would make our lives worthy of us, grand and noble, solid and
impregnable, we must forsake air-castles of dreaming for strongholds
of doing. Every man with an ideal has a right to live in the glow and
inspiration of it, and to picture the joy of attainment, as the tired
traveller fills his mind with the thought of the brightness of home,
to quicken his steps and to make the weary miles seem shorter, but the
worker should never really worry about the future, think little of it
except for inspiration, to determine his course, as mariners study
the stars, to make his plans wisely and to prepare for that future by
making each separate day the best and truest that he can.
Let us live up to the fulness of our possibilities each day. Man has
only one day of life—to-day. He _did_ live yesterday, he _may_ live
to-morrow, but he _has_ only to-day.
The secret of true living—mental, physical and moral, material and
spiritual,—may be expressed in five words: _Live up to your portion._
This is the magic formula that transforms air-castles into fortresses.
Men sometimes grow mellow and generous in the thought of what they
would do if great wealth came to them. "If I were a millionaire," they
say,—and they let the phrase melt sweetly in their mouths as though it
were a caramel,—"I would subsidize genius; I would found a college; I
would build a great hospital; I would erect model tenements; I would
show the world what real charity is." Oh, it is all so easy, so easy,
this vicarious benevolence, this spending of other people's fortunes!
Few of us, according to the latest statistics, have a million, but we
all have something, some part of it. Are we living up to our portion?
Are we generous with what we have?
The man who is selfish with one thousand dollars will not develop
angelic wings of generosity when his million comes. If the generous
spirit be a reality with the individual, instead of an empty boast, he
will, every hour, find opportunity to make it manifest. The radiation
of kindness need not be expressed in money at all. It may be shown in
a smile of human interest, a glow of sympathy, a word of fellowship
with the sorrowing and the struggling, an instinctive outstretching of
a helping hand to one in need.
No man living is so poor that he cannot evidence his spirit of
benevolence toward his fellowman. It may assume that rare and
wondrously beautiful phase of divine charity, in realizing how often
a motive is misrepresented in the act, how sin, sorrow and suffering
have warped and disguised latent good, in substituting a word of gentle
tolerance for some cheap tinsel of shabby cynicism that pretends to
be wit. If we are not rich enough to give "cold, hard" cash, let us
at least be too rich to give "cold, hard" words. Let us leave our
air-castles of vague self-adulation for so wisely spending millions
we have never seen, and rise to the dignity of living up to the full
proportion of our possessions, no matter how slight they may be.
Let us fill the world around us with love, brightness, sweetness,
gentleness, helpfulness, courage and sympathy, as if they were the only
legal tender and we were Monte Cristos with untold treasures of such
gold ever at our call.
Let us cease saying: "If I were," and say ever: "I am." Let us stop
living in the subjunctive mood, and begin to live in the indicative.
The one great defence of humanity against the charge of unfulfilled
duties is "lack of time." The constant clamoring for time would be
pathetic, were it not for the fact that most individuals throw away
more of it than they use. Time is the only really valuable possession
of man, for without it every power within him would cease to exist. Yet
he recklessly squanders his great treasure as if it were valueless.
The wealth of the whole world could not buy one second of time. Yet
Society assassins dare to say in public that they have been "killing
time." The time fallacy has put more people into air-castles than all
other causes combined. Life is only time; eternity is only more time;
immortality is merely man's right to live through unending time.
"If I had a library I would read," is the weak plaint of some other
tenant of an air-castle. If a man does not read the two or three
good books in his possession or accessible to him he would not read
if he had the British Museum brought to his bedside, and the British
Army delegated to continual service in handing him books from the
shelves. The time sacrificed to reading sensational newspapers might be
consecrated to good reading, if the individual were willing merely to
live up to his portion of opportunity.
The man who longs for some crisis in life, wherein he may show mighty
courage, while he is expending no portion of that courage in bearing
bravely the petty trials, sorrows and disappointments of daily life, is
living in an air-castle. He is just a sparrow looking enviously at the
mountain crags where the hardy eagle builds her nest, and dreaming of
being a great bird like that, perhaps even daring in a patronizing way,
to criticise her method of flight and to plume himself with the medals
he could win for flying if he only would. It is the day-by-day heroism
that vitalizes all of a man's power in an emergency, that gives him
confidence that when need comes he will and _must_ be ready.
The air-castle typifies any delusion or folly that makes man forsake
real living for an idle, vague existence. Living in air-castles means
that a man sees life in a wrong perspective. He permits his lower self
to dominate his higher self; he who should tower as a mighty conqueror
over the human weakness, sin and folly that threaten to destroy his
better nature, binds upon his own wrists the manacles of habit that
hold him a slave. He loses the crown of his kingship because he sells
his royal birthright for temporary ease and comfort and the showy
things of the world, sacrificing so much that is best in him for mere
wealth, success, position, or the plaudits of the world. He forsakes
the throne of individuality for the air-castle of delusion.
The man who wraps himself in the Napoleonic cloak of his egotism,
hypnotizing himself into believing that he is superior to all other
men, that the opera-glasses of the universe are focused upon him and
that he treads the stage alone, had better wake up. He is living in
an air-castle. He who, like Narcissus, falls in love with his own
reflection and thinks he has a monopoly of the great work of the world,
whose conceit rises from him like the smoke from the magic bottle of
the genii and spreads till it shuts out and conceals the universe is
living in an air-castle.
The man who believes that all humanity is united in conspiracy against
him, who feels that his life is the hardest in all the world, and lets
the cares, sorrows and trials that come to us all, eclipse the glorious
sun of his happiness, darkening his eyes to his privileges and his
blessings, is living in an air-castle.
The woman who thinks the most beautiful creature in the world is seen
in her mirror, and who exchanges her queenly heritage of noble living
for the shams, jealousies, follies, frivolities and pretences of
society, is living in an air-castle.
The man who makes wealth his god instead of his servant, who is
determined to get rich, rich at any cost, and who is willing to
sacrifice honesty, honor, loyalty, character, family—everything he
should hold dear—for the sake of a mere stack of money-bags, is,
despite his robes of ermine, only a rich pauper living in an air-castle.
The man of ultra-conservatism, the victim of false content, who has no
plans, no ideals, no aspirations beyond the dull round of daily duties
in which he moves like a gold-fish in a globe, is often vain enough to
boast of his lack of progressiveness, in cheap shop-worn phrases from
those whom he permits to do his thinking for him. He does not realize
that faithfulness to duties, in its highest sense, means the constant
aiming at the performance of higher duties, living up, so far as can
be, to the maximum of one's possibilities, not resignedly plodding
along at the minimum. A piece of machinery will do this, but real men
ever seek to rise to higher uses. Such a man is living in an air-castle.
With patronizing contempt he scorns the man of earnest, thoughtful
purpose, who sees his goal far before him but is willing to pay any
honest price to attain it; content to work day by day unceasingly,
through storm and stress, and sunshine and shadow, with sublime
confidence that nature is storing up every stroke of his effort, that,
though times often seem dark and progress but slight, results _must_
come if he have but courage to fight bravely to the end. This man does
not live in an air-castle; he is but battling with destiny for the
possession of his heritage, and is strengthened in character by his
struggle, even though all that he desires may not be fully awarded him.
The man who permits regret for past misdeeds, or sorrow for lost
opportunities to keep him from recreating a proud future from the new
days committed to his care, is losing much of the glory of living.
He is repudiating the manna of new life given each new day, merely
because he misused the manna of years ago. He is doubly unwise, because
he has the wisdom of his past experience and does not profit by it,
merely because of a technicality of useless, morbid regret. He is
living in an air-castle.
The man who spends his time lamenting the fortune he once had, or the
fame that has taken its winged flight into oblivion, frittering away
his golden hours erecting new monuments in the cemetery of his past
achievements and his former greatness, making what he _was_ ever plead
apology for what he _is_, lives in an air-castle. To the world and to
the individual a single egg of new hope and determination, with its
wondrous potency of new life, is greater than a thousand nests full of
the eggs of dead dreams, or unrealized ambitions.
Whatever keeps a man from living his best, truest and highest life now,
in the indicative present, if it be something that he himself places
as an obstacle in his own path of progress and development, is to him
an air-castle.
Some men live in the air-castle of indolence; others in the
air-castle of dissipation, of pride, of avarice, of deception, of
bigotry, of worry, of intemperance, of injustice, of intolerance, of
procrastination, of lying, of selfishness, or of some other mental
or moral characteristic that withdraws them from the real duties and
privileges of living.
Let us find out what is the air-castle in which we, individually, spend
most of our time and we can then begin a re-creation of ourselves. The
bondage of the air-castle must be fought nobly and untiringly.
As man spends his hours and his days and his weeks in an air-castle, he
finds that the delicate gossamer-like strands and lines of the phantom
structure gradually become less and less airy; they begin to grow firm
and firmer, strengthening with the years, until at last, solid walls
hem him in. Then he is startled by the awful realization that habit
and habitancy have transformed his air-castle into a prison from which
escape is difficult.
And then he learns that the most deceptive and dangerous of all things
is,—the air-castle.