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“We come to maturity with as little preparation for the pressures of experience as a bookworm asked to do a ballet.”
Our trouble is not ignorance, but inaction. The purpose of this book is to restate, illustrate, streamline,
“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”
The future is today. ... There is no tomorrow. The day of man’s salvation is now.
Not at all. But he did go on in that address to say that the best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm, on doing today’s work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.
begin the day with Christ’s prayer: “Give us this day our daily bread.” Remember that that prayer asks only for today’s bread. It doesn’t complain about the stale bread we had to eat yesterday; and it doesn’t say: “Oh, God, it has been pretty dry out in the wheat belt lately and we may have another drought-and then how will I get bread to eat next autumn-or suppose I lose my job-oh, God, how could I get bread then?” No, this prayer teaches us to ask for today’s bread only. Today’s bread is the only kind of bread you can possibly eat.
“Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Many men have rejected those words
By all means take thought for the tomorrow, yes, careful thought and planning and preparation. But have no anxiety.
good thinking deals with causes and effects and leads to logical, constructive planning; bad thinking frequently leads to tension and nervous breakdowns.
One step enough for me. Lead, kindly Light ...
“Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.”
‘Every day is a new life to a wise man.’ I typed that sentence out and pasted it on the windshield of my car, where I saw it every minute I was driving. I found it wasn’t so hard to live only one day at a time. I learned to forget the yesterdays and to not-think of the tomorrows. Each morning I said to myself: ‘today is a new life.’
One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon-instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.”
Five hundred years before Christ was born, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus told his students that “everything changes except the law of change” .He said: “You cannot step in the same river twice.” The river changes every second; and so does the man who stepped in it. Life is a ceaseless change. The only certainty is today. Why mar the beauty of living today by trying to solve the problems of a future that is shrouded in ceaseless change and uncertainty-a future that no one can possibly foretell?
Carpe diem.
one of the worst features about worrying is that it destroys our ability to concentrate. When we worry, our minds jump here and there and everywhere, and we lose all power of decision. However, when we force ourselves to face the worst and accept it mentally, we then eliminate all those vague imaginings and put ourselves in a position in which we are able to concentrate on our problem.
“True peace of mind,” said this Chinese philosopher, “comes from accepting the worst. Psychologically, I think, it means a release of energy.”
When we have accepted the worst, we have nothing more to lose. And that automatically means-we have everything to gain!
“Business men who do not know how to fight worry die young.”
“You do not get stomach ulcers from what you eat. You get ulcers from what is eating you.”
“the greatest mistake physicians make is that they attempt to cure the body without attempting to cure the mind; yet the mind and body are one and should not be treated separately!”
But medical science has been unable to cope with the mental and physical wrecks caused, not by germs, but by emotions of worry, fear, hate, frustration, and despair. Casualties caused by these emotional diseases are mounting and spreading with catastrophic rapidity.
and I can see, within one block, one house where worry caused a nervous breakdown-and another house where a man worried himself into diabetes. When the stock market went down, the sugar in his blood and urine went up.
of his home town-Bordeaux-he said to his fellow citizens: “I am willing to take your affairs into my hands but not into my liver and lungs.”
mentally • agreed to accept. RULE 3: Remind yourself of
“If a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial, objective way, his worries will usually evaporate in the light of knowledge.”
“Everything that is in agreement with our personal desires seems true. Everything that is not puts us into a rage.”
That is not an easy task when we are worried. When we are worried, our emotions are riding high. But here are two ideas that I have found helpful when trying to step aside from my problems,
let’s not even attempt to solve our problems without first collecting all the facts in an impartial manner.
problem well stated is a problem half solved.”
Chinese say one picture is worth ten thousand words,
It is the failure to arrive at a fixed purpose, the inability to stop
find that to keep thinking about our problems beyond a certain point is bound to create confusion and worry. There comes a time when any more investigation and thinking are harmful. There comes a time when we must decide and act and never look back.”
1. What is the problem? 2. What is the CAUSE of the problem? 3. What are all possible solutions to the problem? 4. What solution do you suggest?
half the worry in the world is caused by people trying to make decisions before they have sufficient knowledge on which to base a decision.”
I realised that it is difficult to worry while you are busy doing something that requires planning and thinking.
Suppose you lean right back now, close your eyes, and try, at the same instant, to think of the Statue of Liberty and of what you plan to do tomorrow morning.
must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair.”
when he said, in The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant: “A certain comfortable security, a certain profound inner peace, a kind of happy numbness, soothes the nerves of the human animal when absorbed in its allotted task.”
“The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.”
Let’s not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Remember “Life is too short to be little.”
“The whole crew felt better. We knew we had a chance; and that, by the law of averages, we probably wouldn’t be killed.”
“What are the chances, according to the law of averages, that this event I am worrying about will ever occur?”
“Be willing to have it so,” he said. “Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequence of any misfortune.”
“A good supply of resignation is of the first importance in providing for the journey of life.”
Obviously, circumstances alone do not make us happy or unhappy. It is the way we react to circumstances that determines our feelings. Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is within you. That is where the kingdom of hell is, too.
“I found I could take the loss of my eyesight, just as a man can take anything else. If I lost all five of my senses, I know I could live on inside my mind. For it is in the mind we see, and in the mind we live, whether we know it or not.”
“It is not miserable to be blind, it is only miserable not to be able to endure blindness.”
“When I can’t handle events,” he said, “I let them handle themselves.”
