How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (20 page)

The late William Bolitho, author of Twelve Against the Gods, put it like this: "The most important thing in life is not to capitalise on your gains. Any fool can do that. The really important thing is to profit from your losses. That requires intelligence; and it makes the difference between a man of sense and a fool."

Bolitho uttered those words after he had lost a leg in a railway accident. But I know a man who lost both legs and turned his minus into a plus. His name is Ben Fortson. I met him in a hotel elevator in Atlanta, Georgia. As I stepped into the elevator, I noticed this cheerful-looking man, who had both legs missing, sitting in a wheel-chair in a corner of the elevator. When the elevator stopped at his floor, he asked me pleasantly if I would step to one corner, so he could manage his chair better. "So sorry," he said, "to inconvenience you"-and a deep, heart-warming smile lighted his face as he said it.

When I left the elevator and went to my room, I could think of nothing but this cheerful cripple. So I hunted him up and asked him to tell me his story.

"It happened in 1929," he told me with a smile. "I had gone out to cut a load of hickory poles to stake the beans in my garden. I had loaded the poles on my Ford and started back home. Suddenly one pole slipped under the car and jammed the steering apparatus at the very moment I was making a sharp turn. The car shot over an embankment and hurled me against a tree. My spine was hurt. My legs were paralysed.

"I was twenty-four when that happened, and I have never taken a step since."

Twenty-four years old, and sentenced to a wheel-chair for the rest of his life! I asked him how he managed to take it so courageously, and he said: "I didn't." He said he raged and rebelled. He fumed about his fate. But as the years dragged on, he found that his rebellion wasn't getting him anything except bitterness. "I finally realised," he said, "that other people were kind and courteous to me. So the least I could do was to be kind and courteous to them."

I asked if he still felt, after all these years, that his accident had been a terrible misfortune, and he promptly said: "No." He said: "I'm almost glad now that it happened." He told me that after he got over the shock and resentment, he began to live in a different world. He began to read and developed a love for good literature. In fourteen years, he said, he had read at least fourteen hundred books; and those books had opened up new horizons for him and made his life richer than he ever thought possible. He began to listen to good music; and he is now thrilled by great symphonies that would have bored him before. But the biggest change was that he had time to think. "For the first time in my life," he said, "I was able to look at the world and get a real sense of values. I began to realise that most of the things I had been striving for before weren't worth-while at all."

As a result of his reading, he became interested in politics, studied public questions, made speeches from his wheel-chair! He got to know people and people got to know him. Today Ben Fortson-still in his wheel-chair-is Secretary of State for the State of Georgia!

During the last thirty-five years, I have been conducting adult-education classes in New York City, and I have discovered that one of the major regrets of many adults is that they never went to college. They seem to think that not having a college education is a great handicap. I know that this isn't necessarily true because I have known thousands of successful men who never went beyond high school. So I often tell these students the story of a man I knew who had never finished even grade school. He was brought up in blighting poverty. When his father died, his father's friends had to chip in to pay for the coffin in which he was buried. After his father's death, his mother worked in an umbrella factory ten hours a day and then brought piecework home and worked until eleven o'clock at night.

The boy brought up in these circumstances went in for amateur dramatics put on by a club in his church. He got such a thrill out of acting that he decided to take up public speaking. This led him into politics. By the time he reached thirty, he was elected to the New York State legislature. But he was woefully unprepared for such a responsibility. In fact, he told me that frankly he didn't know what it was all about. He studied the long, complicated bills that he was supposed to vote on-but, as far as he was concerned, those bills might as well have been written in the language of the Choctaw Indians. He was worried and bewildered when he was made a member of the committee on forests before he had ever set foot in a forest. He was worried and bewildered when he was made a member of the State Banking Commission before he had ever had a bank account. He himself told me that he was so discouraged that he would have resigned from the legislature if he hadn't been ashamed to admit defeat to his mother. In despair, he decided to study sixteen hours a day and turn his lemon of ignorance into a lemonade of knowledge. By doing that, he transformed himself from a local politician into a national figure and made himself so outstanding that The New York Times called him "the best-loved citizen of New York".

I am talking about Al Smith.

Ten years after Al Smith set out on his programme of political self-education, he was the greatest living authority on the government of New York State. He was elected Governor of New York for four terms-a record never attained by any other man. In 1928, he was the Democratic candidate for President. Six great universities-including Columbia and Harvard-conferred honorary degrees upon this man who had never gone beyond grade school.

Al Smith himself told me that none of these things would ever have come to pass if he hadn't worked hard sixteen hours a day to turn his minus into a plus.

Nietzsche's formula for the superior man was "not only to bear up under necessity but to love it".

The more I have studied the careers of men of achievement the more deeply I have been convinced that a surprisingly large number of them succeeded because they started out with handicaps that spurred them on to great endeavour and great rewards. As William James said: "Our infirmities help us unexpectedly."

Yes, it is highly probable that Milton wrote better poetry because he was blind and that Beethoven composed better music because he was deaf.

Helen Keller's brilliant career was inspired and made possible because of her blindness and deafness.

If Tchaikovsky had not been frustrated-and driven almost to suicide by his tragic marriage-if his own life had not been pathetic, he probably would never have been able to compose his immortal "Symphonic Pathetique".

If Dostoevsky and Tolstoy had not led tortured lives, they would probably never have been able to write their immortal novels.

"If I had not been so great an invalid," wrote the man who changed the scientific concept of life on earth-"if I had not been so great an invalid, I should not have done so much work as I have accomplished." That was Charles Darwin's confession that his infirmities had helped him unexpectedly.

The same day that Darwin was born in England another baby was born in a log cabin in the forests of Kentucky. He, too, was helped by his infirmities. His name was Lincoln- Abraham Lincoln. If he had been reared in an aristocratic family and had had a law degree from Harvard and a happy married life, he would probably never have found in the depths of his heart the haunting words that he immortalised at Gettysburg, nor the sacred poem that he spoke at his second inauguration-the most beautiful and noble phrases ever uttered by a ruler of men: "With malice toward none; with charity for all ..."

Harry Emerson Fosdick says in his book, The Power to See it Through; "There is a Scandinavian saying which some of us might well take as a rallying cry for our lives: 'The north wind made the Vikings.' Wherever did we get the idea that secure and pleasant living, the absence of difficulty, and the comfort of ease, ever of themselves made people either good or happy? Upon the contrary, people who pity themselves go on pitying themselves even when they are laid softly on a cushion, but always in history character and happiness have come to people in all sorts of circumstances, good, bad, and indifferent, when they shouldered their personal responsibility. So, repeatedly the north wind has made the Vikings."

Suppose we are so discouraged that we feel there is no hope of our ever being able to turn our lemons into lemonade-then here are two reasons why we ought to try, anyway-two reasons why we have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Reason one: We may succeed.

Reason two: Even if we don't succeed, the mere attempt to turn our minus into a plus will cause us to look forward instead of backward; it will replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts; it will release creative energy and spur us to get so busy that we won't have either the time or the inclination to mourn over what is past and for ever gone.

Once when Ole Bull, the world-famous violinist, was giving a concert in Paris, the A string on his violin suddenly snapped. But Ole Bull simply finished the melody on three strings. "That is life," says Harry Emerson Fosdick, "to have your A string snap and finish on three strings."

That is not only life. It is more than life. It is life triumphant!

If I had the power to do so, I would have these words of William Bolitho carved in eternal bronze and hung in every schoolhouse in the land:

The most important thing in life is not to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. The really important thing is to profit from your losses. That requires intelligence; and it makes the difference between a man of sense and a fool.

So, to cultivate a mental attitude that will bring us peace and happiness, let's do something about Rule 6:

When fate hands us a lemon, let's try to make a lemonade.

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Chapter 18: How To Cure Melancholy In Fourteen Days

When I started writing this book, I offered a two-hundred-dollar prize for the most helpful and inspiring true story on "How I Conquered Worry".

The three judges for this contest were: Eddie Rickenbacker, president, Eastern Air Lines; Dr. Stewart W. McClelland, president, Lincoln Memorial University; H. V. Kaltenborn, radio news analyst. However, we received two stories so superb that the judges found it impossible to choose between them. So we divided the prize. Here is one of the stories that tied for first prize-the story of C.R. Burton (who works for Whizzer Motor Sales of Missouri, Inc.), 1067 Commercial Street, Springfield, Missouri.

"I lost my mother when I was nine years old, and my father when I was twelve," Mr. Burton wrote me. "My father was killed, but my mother simply walked out of the house one day nineteen years ago; and I have never seen her since. Neither have I ever seen my two little sisters that she took with her. She never even wrote me a letter until after she had been gone seven years. My father was killed in an accident three years after Mother left. He and a partner bought a cafe in a small Missouri town; and while Father was away on a business trip, his partner sold the cafe for cash and skipped out. A friend wired Father to hurry back home; and in his hurry, Father was killed in a car accident at Salinas, Kansas. Two of my father's sisters, who were poor and old and sick took three of the children into their homes. Nobody wanted me and my little brother. We were left at the mercy of the town. We were haunted by the fear of being called orphans and treated as orphans. Our fears soon materialised, too.

I lived for a little while with a poor family in town. But times were hard and the head of the family lost his job, so they couldn't afford to feed me any longer. Then Mr. and Mrs. Loftin took me to live with them on their farm eleven miles from town. Mr. Loftin was seventy years old, and sick in bed with shingles. He told me I could stay there 'as long as I didn't lie, didn't steal, and did as I was told'. Those three orders became my Bible. I lived by them strictly. I started to school, but the first week found me at home, bawling like a baby. The other children picked on me and poked fun at my big nose and said I was dumb and called me an 'orphan brat'. I was hurt so badly that I wanted to fight them; but Mr. Loftin, the farmer who had taken me in, said to me: 'Always remember that it takes a bigger man to walk away from a fight than it does to stay and fight.' I didn't fight until one day a kid picked up some chicken manure from the schoolhouse yard and threw it in my face. I beat the hell out of him; and made a couple of friends. They said he had it coming to him.

"I was proud of a new cap that Mrs. Loftin had bought me. One day one of the big girls jerked it off my head and filled it with water and ruined it. She said she filled it with water so that 'the water would wet my thick skull and keep my popcorn brains from popping'.

"I never cried at school, but I used to bawl it out at home. Then one day Mrs. Loftin gave me some advice that did away with all troubles and worries and turned my enemies into friends. She said: 'Ralph, they won't tease you and call you an "orphan brat" any more if you will get interested in them and see how much you can do for them.' I took her advice. I studied hard; and I soon headed the class. I was never envied because I went out of my way to help them.

"I helped several of the boys write their themes and essays. I wrote complete debates for some of the boys. One lad was ashamed to let his folks know that I was helping him. So he used to tell his mother he was going possum hunting. Then he would come to Mr. Loftin's farm and tie his dogs up in the barn while I helped him with his lessons. I wrote book reviews for one lad and spent several evenings helping one of the girls on her math's.

"Death struck our neighbourhood. Two elderly farmers died and one woman was deserted by her husband. I was the only male in four families. I helped these widows for two years. On my way to and from school, I stopped at their farms, cut wood for them, milked their cows, and fed and watered their stock. I was now blessed instead of cursed. I was accepted as a friend by everyone. They showed their real feelings when I returned home from the Navy. More than two hundred farmers came to see me the first day I was home. Some of them drove as far as eighty miles, and their concern for me was really sincere. Because I have been busy and happy trying to help other people, I have few worries; and I haven't been called an 'orphan brat' now for thirteen years."