How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (9 page)

I know a business man in New York who fought the "wibber gibbers" by getting so busy that he had no time to fret and stew. His name is Tremper Longman, and his office is at 40 Wall Street. He was a student in one of my adult-education classes; and his talk on conquering worry was so interesting, so impressive, that I asked him to have supper with me after class; and we sat in a restaurant until long past midnight, discussing his experiences. Here is the story he told me: "Eighteen years ago, I was so worried I had insomnia. I was tense, irritated, and jittery. I felt I was headed for a nervous breakdown.

"I had reason to be worried. I was treasurer of the Crown Fruit and Extract Company, 418 West Broadway, New York. We had half a million dollars invested in strawberries packed in gallon tins. For twenty years, we had been selling these gallon tins of strawberries to manufactures of ice cream. Suddenly our sales stopped because the big ice-cream makers, such as National Dairy and Borden's, were rapidly increasing their production and were saving money and time by buying strawberries packed in barrels.

"Not only were we left with half a million dollars in berries we couldn't sell, but we were also under contract to buy a million dollars more of strawberries in the next twelve months! We had already borrowed $350,000 from the banks. We couldn't possibly pay off or renew these loans. No wonder I was worried!

"I rushed out to Watsonville, California, where our factory was located, and tried to persuade our president that conditions had changed, that we were facing ruin. He refused to believe it. He blamed our New York office for all the trouble-poor salesmanship.

"After days of pleading, I finally persuaded him to stop packing more strawberries and to sell our new supply on the fresh berry market in San Francisco. That almost solved our problems. I should have been able to stop worrying then; but I couldn't. Worry is a habit; and I had that habit.

"When I returned to New York, I began worrying about everything; the cherries we were buying in Italy, the pineapples we were buying in Hawaii, and so on. I was tense, jittery, couldn't sleep; and, as I have already said, I was heading for a nervous breakdown.

"In despair, I adopted a way of life that cured my insomnia and stopped my worries. I got busy. I got so busy with problems demanding all my faculties that I had no time to worry. I had been working seven hours a day. I now began working fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I got down to the office every morning at eight o'clock and stayed there every night until almost midnight. I took on new duties, new responsibilities. When I got home at midnight, I was so exhausted when I fell in bed that I became unconscious in a few seconds.

"I kept up this programme for about three months. I had broken the habit of worry by that time, so I returned to a normal working day of seven or eight hours. This event occurred eighteen years ago. I have never been troubled with insomnia or worry since then."

George Bernard Shaw was right. He summed it all up when he said: "The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not." So don't bother to think about it! Spit on your hands and get busy. Your blood will start circulating; your mind will start ticking -and pretty soon this whole positive upsurge of life in your body will drive worry from your mind. Get busy. Keep busy. It's the cheapest kind of medicine there is on this earth-and one of the best.

To break the worry habit, here is Rule 1:

Keep busy. The worried person must lose himself in action, lest be wither in despair.

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Chapter 7 - Don't Let the Beetles Get You Down

Here is a dramatic story that I'll probably remember as long as I live. It was told to me by Robert Moore, of 14 Highland Avenue, Maplewood, New Jersey.

"I learned the biggest lesson of my life in March, 1945," he said, "I learned it under 276 feet of water off the coast of Indo-China. I was one of eighty-eight men aboard the submarine Baya S.S. 318. We had discovered by radar that a small Japanese convoy was coming our way. As daybreak approached, we submerged to attack. I saw through the periscope a Jap destroyer escort, a tanker, and a minelayer. We fired three torpedoes at the destroyer escort, but missed. Something went haywire in the mechanics of each torpedo. The destroyer, not knowing that she had been attacked, continued on. We were getting ready to attack the last ship, the minelayer, when suddenly she turned and came directly at us. (A Jap plane had spotted us under sixty feet of water and had radioed our position to the Jap minelayer.) We went down to 150 feet, to avoid detection, and rigged for a depth charge. We put extra bolts on the hatches; and, in order to make our sub absolutely silent, we turned off the fans, the cooling system, and all electrical gear.

"Three minutes later, all hell broke loose. Six depth charges exploded all around us and pushed us down to the ocean floor -a depth of 276 feet. We were terrified. To be attacked in less than a thousand feet of water is dangerous-less than five hundred feet is almost always fatal. And we were being attacked in a trifle more than half of five hundred feet of water -just about knee-deep, as far as safety was concerned. For fifteen hours, that Jap minelayer kept dropping depth charges.

If a depth charge explodes within seventeen feet of a sub, the concussion will blow a hole in it. Scores of these depth charges exploded within fifty feet of us. We were ordered 'to secure'- to lie quietly in our bunks and remain calm. I was so terrified I could hardly breathe. 'This is death,' I kept saying to myself over and over. 'This is death! ... This is death!' With the fans and cooling system turned off, the air inside the sub was over a hundred degrees; but I was so chilled with fear that I put on a sweater and a fur-lined jacket; and still I trembled with cold. My teeth chattered. I broke out in a cold, clammy sweat. The attack continued for fifteen hours. Then ceased suddenly. Apparently the Jap minelayer had exhausted its supply of depth charges, and steamed away. Those fifteen hours of attack seemed like fifteen million years. All my life passed before me in review.

I remembered all the bad things I had done, all the little absurd things I had worried about. I had been a bank clerk before I joined the Navy. I had worried about the long hours, the poor pay, the poor prospects of advancement. I had worried because I couldn't own my own home, couldn't buy a new car, couldn't buy my wife nice clothes. How I had hated my old boss, who was always nagging and scolding! I remembered how I would come home at night sore and grouchy and quarrel with my wife over trifles. I had worried about a scar on my forehead-a nasty cut from an auto accident.

"How big all these worries seemed years ago! But how absurd they seemed when depth charges were threatening to blow me to kingdom come. I promised myself then and there that if I ever saw the sun and the stars again, I would never, never worry again. Never! Never! I Never!!! I learned more about the art of living in those fifteen terrible hours in that submarine than I had learned by studying books for four years in Syracuse University."

We often face the major disasters of life bravely-and then let the trifles, the "pains in the neck", get us down. For example, Samuel Pepys tells in his Diary about seeing Sir Harry Vane's head chopped off in London. As Sir Harry mounted the platform, he was not pleading for his life, but was pleading with the executioner not to hit the painful boil on his neck!

That was another thing that Admiral Byrd discovered down in the terrible cold and darkness of the polar nights-that his men fussed more about the ' 'pains in the neck" than about the big things. They bore, without complaining, the dangers, the hardships, and the cold that was often eighty degrees below zero. "But," says Admiral Byrd, "I know of bunkmates who quit speaking because each suspected the other of inching his gear into the other's allotted space; and I knew of one who could not eat unless he could find a place in the mess hall out of sight of the Fletcherist who solemnly chewed his food twenty-eight times before swallowing.

"In a polar camp," says Admiral Byrd, "little things like that have the power to drive even disciplined men to the edge of insanity."

And you might have added, Admiral Byrd, that "little things" in marriage drive people to the edge of insanity and cause "half the heartaches in the world."

At least, that is what the authorities say. For example, Judge Joseph Sabath of Chicago, after acting as arbiter in more than forty thousand unhappy marriages, declared: "Trivialities are at the bottom of most marital unhappiness"; and Frank S. Hogan, District Attorney of New York County, says: "Fully half the cases in our criminal courts originate in little things. Bar-room bravado, domestic wrangling, an insulting remark, a disparaging word, a rude action-those are the little things that lead to assault and murder. Very few of us are cruelly and greatly wronged. It is the small blows to our self-esteem, the indignities, the little jolts to our vanity, which cause half the heartaches in the world."

When Eleanor Roosevelt was first married, she "worried for days" because her new cook had served a poor meal. "But if that happened now," Mrs. Roosevelt says, "I would shrug my shoulders and forget it." Good. That is acting like an adult emotionally. Even Catherine the Great, an absolute autocrat, used to laugh the thing off when the cook spoiled a meal.

Mrs. Carnegie and I had dinner at a friend's house in Chicago. While carving the meat, he did something wrong. I didn't notice it; and I wouldn't have cared even if I had noticed it But his wife saw it and jumped down his throat right in front of us. "John," she cried, "watch what you are doing! Can't you ever learn to serve properly!"

Then she said to us: "He is always making mistakes. He just doesn't try." Maybe he didn't try to carve; but I certainly give him credit for trying to live with her for twenty years. Frankly, I would rather have eaten a couple of hot dogs with mustard-in an atmosphere of peace-than to have dined on Peking duck and shark fins while listening to her scolding.

Shortly after that experience, Mrs. Carnegie and I had some friends at our home for dinner. Just before they arrived, Mrs. Carnegie found that three of the napkins didn't match the tablecloth.

"I rushed to the cook," she told me later, "and found that the other three napkins had gone to the laundry. The guests were at the door. There was no time to change. I felt like bursting into tears! All I could think was: 'Why did this stupid mistake have to spoil my whole evening?' Then I thought-well-why let it? I went in to dinner, determined to have a good time. And I did. I would much rather our friends think I was a sloppy housekeeper," she told me, "than a nervous, bad-tempered one. And anyhow, as far as I could make out, no one noticed the napkins!"

A well-known legal maxim says: De minimis non curat lex- "the law does not concern itself with trifles." And neither should the worrier-if he wants peace of mind.

Much of the time, all we need to overcome the annoyance of trifles is to affect a shifting of emphasis-set up a new, and pleasurable, point of view in the mind. My friend Homer Croy, who wrote They Had to See Paris and a dozen other books, gives a wonderful example of how this can be done. He used to be driven half crazy, while working on a book, by the rattling of the radiators in his New York apartment. The steam would bang and sizzle-and he would sizzle with irritation as he sat at his desk.

"Then," says Homer Croy, "I went with some friends on a camping expedition. While listening to the limbs crackling in the roaring fire, I thought how much they sounded like the crackling of the radiators. Why should I like one and hate the other? When I went home I said to myself: 'The crackling of the limbs in the fire was a pleasant sound; the sound of the radiators is about the same-I'll go to sleep and not worry about the noise.' And I did. For a few days I was conscious of the radiators; but soon I forgot all about them.

"And so it is with many petty worries. We dislike them and get into a stew, all because we exaggerate their importance. ..."

Disraeli said: "Life is too short to be little." "Those words," said Andre Maurois in This Week magazine, "have helped me through many a painful experience: often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. ... Here we are on this earth, with only a few more decades to live, and we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year's time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worth-while actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings. For life is too short to be little."

Even so illustrious a figure as Rudyard Kipling forgot at times that "Life is too short to be little". The result? He and his brother-in-law fought the most famous court battle in the history of Vermont-a battle so celebrated that a book has been written about it: Rudyard Kipling's Vermont Feud.

The story goes like this: Kipling married a Vermont girl, Caroline Balestier, built a lovely home in Brattleboro, Vermont; settled down and expected to spend the rest of his life there. His brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier, became Kipling's best friend. The two of them worked and played together.

Then Kipling bought some land from Balestier, with the understanding that Balestier would be allowed to cut hay off it each season. One day, Balestier found Kipling laying out a flower garden on this hayfield. His blood boiled. He hit the ceiling. Kipling fired right back. The air over the Green Mountains of Vermont turned blue!

A few days later, when Kipling was out riding his bicycle, his brother-in-law drove a wagon and a team of horses across the road suddenly and forced Kipling to take a spill. And Kipling the man who wrote: "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you"- he lost his own head, and swore out a warrant for Balestier's arrest I A sensational trial followed. Reporters from the big cities poured into the town. The news flashed around the world. Nothing was settled. This quarrel caused Kipling and his wife to abandon their American home for the rest of their lives. All that worry and bitterness over a mere trifle! A load of hay.