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William George Jordan >> The Majesty of Calmness
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The Majesty of Calmness
Individual Problems
and Possibilities...
by
William George Jordan
Author of "The Kingship of Self-Control"
CONTENTS
I. THE MAJESTY OF CALMNESS
II. HURRY, THE SCOURGE OF AMERICA
III. THE POWER OF PERSONAL INFLUENCE
IV. THE DIGNITY OF SELF-RELIANCE
V. FAILURE AS A SUCCESS
VI. DOING OUR BEST AT ALL TIMES
VII. THE ROYAL ROAD TO HAPPINESS
I
The Majesty of Calmness
Calmness is the rarest quality in human life. It is the poise of a
great nature, in harmony with itself and its ideals. It is the moral
atmosphere of a life self-centred, self-reliant, and self-controlled.
Calmness is singleness of purpose, absolute confidence, and conscious
power,--ready to be focused in an instant to meet any crisis.
The Sphinx is not a true type of calmness,--petrifaction is not
calmness; it is death, the silencing of all the energies; while no one
lives his life more fully, more intensely and more consciously than the
man who is calm.
The Fatalist is not calm. He is the coward slave of his environment,
hopelessly surrendering to his present condition, recklessly
indifferent to his future. He accepts his life as a rudderless ship,
drifting on the ocean of time. He has no compass, no chart, no known
port to which he is sailing. His self-confessed inferiority to all
nature is shown in his existence of constant surrender. It is not,--
calmness.
The man who is calm has his course in life clearly marked on his chart.
His hand is ever on the helm. Storm, fog, night, tempest, danger,
hidden reefs,--he is ever prepared and ready for them. He is made calm
and serene by the realization that in these crises of his voyage he
needs a clear mind and a cool head; that he has naught to do but to do
each day the best he can by the light he has; that he will never flinch
nor falter for a moment; that, though he may have to tack and leave his
course for a time, he will never drift, he will get back into the true
channel, he will keep ever headed toward his harbor. _When_ he
will reach it, _how_ he will reach it, matters not to him. He
rests in calmness, knowing he has done his best. If his best seem to be
overthrown or overruled, then he must still bow his head,--in calmness.
To no man is permitted to know the future of his life, the finality.
God commits to man ever only new beginnings, new wisdom, and new days
to use the best of his knowledge.
Calmness comes ever from within. It is the peace and restfulness of the
depths of our nature. The fury of storm and of wind agitate only the
surface of the sea; they can penetrate only two or three hundred feet,--
below that is the calm, unruffled deep. To be ready for the great
crises of life we must learn serenity in our daily living. Calmness is
the crown of self-control.
When the worries and cares of the day fret you, and begin to wear upon
you, and you chafe under the friction,--be calm. Stop, rest for a
moment, and let calmness and peace assert themselves. If you let these
irritating outside influences get the better of you, you are confessing
your inferiority to them, by permitting them to dominate you. Study the
disturbing elements, each by itself, bring all the will power of your
nature to bear upon them, and you will find that they will, one by one,
melt into nothingness, like vapors fading before the sun. The glow of
calmness that will then pervade your mind, the tingling sensation of an
inflow of new strength, may be to you the beginning of the revelation
of the supreme calmness that is possible for you. Then, in some great
hour of your life, when you stand face to face with some awful trial,
when the structure of your ambition and life-work crumbles in a moment,
you will be brave. You can then fold your arms calmly, look out
undismayed and undaunted upon the ashes of your hope, upon the wreck of
what you have faithfully built, and with brave heart and unfaltering
voice you may say: "So let it be,--I will build again."
When the tongue of malice and slander, the persecution of inferiority,
tempts you for just a moment to retaliate, when for an instant you
forget yourself so far as to hunger for revenge,--be calm. When the
grey heron is pursued by its enemy, the eagle, it does not run to
escape; it remains calm, takes a dignified stand, and waits quietly,
facing the enemy unmoved. With the terrific force with which the eagle
makes its attack, the boasted king of birds is often impaled and run
through on the quiet, lance-like bill of the heron. The means that man
takes to kill another's character becomes suicide of his own.
No man in the world ever attempted to wrong another without being
injured in return,--someway, somehow, sometime. The only weapon of
offence that Nature seems to recognize is the boomerang. Nature keeps
her books admirably; she puts down every item, she closes all accounts
finally, but she does not always balance them at the end of the month.
To the man who is calm, revenge is so far beneath him that he cannot
reach it,--even by stooping. When injured, he does not retaliate; he
wraps around him the royal robes of Calmness, and he goes quietly on
his way.
When the hand of Death touches the one we hold dearest, paralyzes our
energy, and eclipses the sun of our life, the calmness that has been
accumulating in long years becomes in a moment our refuge, our reserve
strength.
The most subtle of all temptations is the _seeming_ success of the
wicked. It requires moral courage to see, without flinching, material
prosperity coming to men who are dishonest; to see politicians rise
into prominence, power and wealth by trickery and corruption; to see
virtue in rags and vice in velvets; to see ignorance at a premium, and
knowledge at a discount. To the man who is really calm these puzzles of
life do not appeal. He is living his life as best he can; he is not
worrying about the problems of justice, whose solution must be left to
Omniscience to solve.
When man has developed the spirit of Calmness until it becomes so
absolutely part of him that his very presence radiates it, he has made
great progress in lite. Calmness cannot be acquired of itself and by
itself; it must come as the culmination of a series of virtues. What
the world needs and what individuals need is a higher standard of
living, a great realizing sense of the privilege and dignity of life, a
higher and nobler conception of individuality.
With this great sense of calmness permeating an individual, man becomes
able to retire more into himself, away from the noise, the confusion
and strife of the world, which come to his ears only as faint, far-off
rumblings, or as the tumult of the life of a city heard only as a
buzzing hum by the man in a balloon.
The man who is calm does not selfishly isolate himself from the world,
for he is intensely interested in all that concerns the welfare of
humanity. His calmness is but a Holy of Holies into which he can retire
_from_ the world to get strength to live _in_ the world. He
realizes that the full glory of individuality, the crowning of his
self-control is,--the majesty of calmness.
II
Hurry, the Scourge of America
The first sermon in the world was preached at the Creation. It was a
Divine protest against Hurry. It was a Divine object lesson of perfect
law, perfect plan, perfect order, perfect method. Six days of work
carefully planned, scheduled and completed were followed by,--rest.
Whether we accept the story as literal or as figurative, as the account
of successive days or of ages comprising millions of years, matters
little if we but learn the lesson.
Nature is very un-American. Nature never hurries. Every phase of her
working shows plan, calmness, reliability, and the absence of hurry.
Hurry always implies lack of definite method, confusion, impatience of
slow growth. The Tower of Babel, the world's first skyscraper, was a
failure because of hurry. The workers mistook their arrogant ambition
for inspiration. They had too many builders,--and no architect. They
thought to make up the lack of a head by a superfluity of hands. This
is a characteristic of Hurry. It seeks ever to make energy a substitute
for a clearly defined plan,--the result is ever as hopeless as trying
to transform a hobby-horse into a real steed by brisk riding.
Hurry is a counterfeit of haste. Haste has an ideal, a distinct aim to
be realized by the quickest, direct methods. Haste has a single compass
upon which it relies for direction and in harmony with which its course
is determined. Hurry says: "I must move faster. I will get three
compasses; I will have them different; I will be guided by all of them.
One of them will probably be right." Hurry never realizes that slow,
careful foundation work is the quickest in the end.
Hurry has ruined more Americans than has any other word in the
vocabulary of life. It is the scourge of America; and is both a cause
and a result of our high-pressure civilization. Hurry adroitly assumes
so many masquerades of disguise that its identity is not always
recognized.
Hurry always pays the highest price for everything, and, usually the
goods are not delivered. In the race for wealth men often sacrifice
time, energy, health, home, happiness and honor,--everything that money
cannot buy, the very things that money can never bring back. Hurry is a
phantom of paradoxes. Business men, in their desire to provide for the
future happiness of their family, often sacrifice the present happiness
of wife and children on the altar of Hurry. They forget that their
place in the home should be something greater than being merely "the
man that pays the bills;" they expect consideration and thoughtfulness
that they are not giving.
We hear too much of a wife's duties to a husband and too little of the
other side of the question. "The wife," they tell us, "should meet her
husband with a smile and a kiss, should tactfully watch his moods and
be ever sweetness and sunshine." Why this continual swinging of the
censer of devotion to the man of business? Why should a woman have to
look up with timid glance at the face of her husband, to "size up his
mood"? Has not her day, too, been one of care, and responsibility, and
watchfulness? Has not mother-love been working over perplexing problems
and worries of home and of the training of the children that wifely
love may make her seek to solve in secret? Is man, then, the weaker sex
that he must be pampered and treated as tenderly as a boil trying to
keep from contact with the world?
In their hurry to attain some ambition, to gratify the dream of a life,
men often throw honor, truth, and generosity to the winds. Politicians
dare to stand by and see a city poisoned with foul water until they
"see where they come in" on a water-works appropriation. If it be
necessary to poison an army,--that, too, is but an incident in the
hurry for wealth.
This is the Age of the Hothouse. The element of natural growth is
pushed to one side and the hothouse and the force-pump are substituted.
Nature looks on tolerantly as she says: "So far you may go, but no
farther, my foolish children."
The educational system of to-day is a monumental institution dedicated
to Hurry. The children are forced to go through a series of studies
that sweep the circle of all human wisdom. They are given everything
that the ambitious ignorance of the age can force into their minds;
they are taught everything but the essentials,--how to use their senses
and how to think. Their minds become congested by a great mass of
undigested facts, and still the cruel, barbarous forcing goes on. You
watch it until it seems you cannot stand it a moment longer, and you
instinctively put out your hand and say: "Stop! This modern slaughter
of the Innocents must _not_ go on!" Education smiles suavely,
waves her hand complacently toward her thousands of knowledge-prisons
over the country, and says: "Who are you that dares speak a word
against our sacred, school system?" Education is in a hurry. Because
she fails in fifteen years to do what half the time should accomplish
by better methods, she should not be too boastful. Incompetence is not
always a reason for pride. And they hurry the children into a hundred
textbooks, then into ill-health, then into the colleges, then into a
diploma, then into life,--with a dazed mind, untrained and unfitted for
the real duties of living.
Hurry is the deathblow to calmness, to dignity, to poise. The old-time
courtesy went out when the new-time hurry came in. Hurry is the father
of dyspepsia. In the rush of our national life, the bolting of food has
become a national vice. The words "Quick Lunches" might properly be
placed on thousands of headstones in our cemeteries. Man forgets that
he is the only animal that dines; the others merely feed. Why does he
abrogate his right to dine and go to the end of the line with the mere
feeders? His self-respecting stomach rebels, and expresses its
indignation by indigestion. Then man has to go through life with a
little bottle of pepsin tablets in his vest-pocket. He is but another
victim to this craze for speed. Hurry means the breakdown of the
nerves. It is the royal road to nervous prostration.
Everything that is great in life is the product of slow growth; the
newer, and greater, and higher, and nobler the work, the slower is its
growth, the surer is its lasting success. Mushrooms attain their full
power in a night; oaks require decades. A fad lives its life in a few
weeks; a philosophy lives through generations and centuries. If you are
sure you are right, do not let the voice of the world, or of friends,
or of family swerve you for a moment from your purpose. Accept slow
growth if it must be slow, and know the results _must_ come, as
you would accept the long, lonely hours of the night,--with absolute
assurance that the heavy-leaded moments _must_ bring the morning.
Let us as individuals banish the word "Hurry" from our lives. Let us
care for nothing so much that we would pay honor and self-respect as
the price of hurrying it. Let us cultivate calmness, restfulness,
poise, sweetness,--doing our best, bearing all things as bravely as we
can; living our life undisturbed by the prosperity of the wicked or the
malice of the envious. Let us not be impatient, chafing at delay,
fretting over failure, wearying over results, and weakening under
opposition. Let us ever turn our face toward the future with confidence
and trust, with the calmness of a life in harmony with itself, true to
its ideals, and slowly and constantly progressing toward their
realization.
Let us see that cowardly word Hurry in all its most degenerating
phases, let us see that it ever kills truth, loyalty, thoroughness; and
let us determine that, day by day, we will seek more and more to
substitute for it the calmness and repose of a true life, nobly lived.
III
The Power of Personal Influence
The only responsibility that a man cannot evade in this life is the one
he thinks of least,--his personal influence. Man's conscious influence,
when he is on dress-parade, when he is posing to impress those around
him,--is woefully small. But his unconscious influence, the silent,
subtle radiation of his personality, the effect of his words and acts,
the trifles he never considers,--is tremendous. Every moment of life he
is changing to a degree the life of the whole world. Every man has an
atmosphere which is affecting every other. So silent and unconsciously
is this influence working, that man may forget that it exists.
All the forces of Nature,--heat, light, electricity and gravitation,--
are silent and invisible. We never _see_ them; we only know that
they exist by seeing the effects they produce. In all Nature the
wonders of the "seen" are dwarfed into insignificance when compared
with the majesty and glory of the "unseen." The great sun itself does
not supply enough heat and light to sustain animal and vegetable life
on the earth. We are dependent for nearly half of our light and heat
upon the stars, and the greater part of this supply of life-giving
energy comes from _invisible_ stars, millions of miles from the
earth. In a thousand ways Nature constantly seeks to lead men to a
keener and deeper realization of the power and the wonder of the
invisible.
Into the hands of every individual is given a marvellous power for good
or for evil,--the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life.
This is simply the constant radiation of what a man really _is_,
not what he pretends to be. Every man, by his mere living, is radiating
sympathy, or sorrow, or morbidness, or cynicism, or happiness, or hope,
or any of a hundred other qualities. Life is a state of constant
radiation and absorption; to exist is to radiate; to exist is to be the
recipient of radiations.
There are men and women whose presence seems to radiate sunshine, cheer
and optimism. You feel calmed and rested and restored in a moment to a
new and stronger faith in humanity. There are others who focus in an
instant all your latent distrust, morbidness and rebellion against
life. Without knowing why, you chafe and fret in their presence. You
lose your bearings on life and its problems. Your moral compass is
disturbed and unsatisfactory. It is made untrue in an instant, as the
magnetic needle of a ship is deflected when it passes near great
mountains of iron ore.
There are men who float down the stream of life like icebergs,--cold,
reserved, unapproachable and self-contained. In their presence you
involuntarily draw your wraps closer around you, as you wonder who left
the door open. These refrigerated human beings have a most depressing
influence on all those who fall under the spell of their radiated
chilliness. But there are other natures, warm, helpful, genial, who are
like the Gulf Stream, following their own course, flowing undaunted and
undismayed in the ocean of colder waters. Their presence brings warmth
and life and the glow of sunshine, the joyous, stimulating breath of
spring. There are men who are like malarious swamps,--poisonous,
depressing and weakening by their very presence. They make heavy,
oppressive and gloomy the atmosphere of their own homes; the sound of
the children's play is stilled, the ripples of laughter are frozen by
their presence. They go through life as if each day were a new big
funeral, and they were always chief mourners. There are other men who
seem like the ocean; they are constantly bracing, stimulating, giving
new draughts of tonic life and strength by their very presence.
There are men who are insincere in heart, and that insincerity is
radiated by their presence. They have a wondrous interest in your
welfare,--when they need you. They put on a "property" smile so
suddenly, when it serves their purpose, that it seems the smile must be
connected with some electric button concealed in their clothes. Their
voice has a simulated cordiality that long training may have made
almost natural. But they never play their part absolutely true, the
mask _will_ slip down sometimes; their cleverness cannot teach
their eyes the look of sterling honesty; they may deceive some people,
but they cannot deceive all. There is a subtle power of revelation
which makes us say: "Well, I cannot explain how it is, but I know that
man is not honest."
Man cannot escape for one moment from this radiation of his character,
this constantly weakening or strengthening of others. He cannot evade
the responsibility by saying it is an unconscious influence. He can
_select_ the qualities that he will permit to be radiated. He can
cultivate sweetness, calmness, trust, generosity, truth, justice,
loyalty, nobility,--make them vitally active in his character,--and by
these qualities he will constantly affect the world.
Discouragement often comes to honest souls trying to live the best they
can, in the thought that they are doing so little good in the world.
Trifles unnoted by us may be links in the chain of some great purpose.
In 1797, William Godwin wrote The Inquirer, a collection of
revolutionary essays on morals and politics. This book influenced
Thomas Malthus to write his Essay on Population, published in 1798.
Malthus' book suggested to Charles Darwin a point of view upon which he
devoted many years of his life, resulting, in 1859, in the publication
of The Origin of Species,--the most influential book of the nineteenth
century, a book that has revolutionized all science. These were but
three links of influence extending over sixty years. It might be
possible to trace this genealogy of influence back from Godwin, through
generation and generation, to the word or act of some shepherd in early
Britain, watching his flock upon the hills, living his quiet life, and
dying with the thought that he had done nothing to help the world.
Men and women have duties to others,--and duties to themselves. In
justice to ourselves we should refuse to live in an atmosphere that
keeps us from living our best. If the fault be in us, we should master
it. If it be the personal influence of others that, like a noxious
vapor, kills our best impulses, we should remove from that influence,--
if we can _possibly_ move without forsaking duties. If it be wrong
to move, then we should take strong doses of moral quinine to counteract
the malaria of influence. It is not what those around us _do_ for
us that counts,--it is what they _are_ to us. We carry our house-
plants from one window to another to give them the proper heat, light,
air and moisture. Should we not be at least as careful of ourselves?
To make our influence felt we must live our faith, we must practice
what we believe. A magnet does not attract iron, as iron. It must first
convert the iron into another magnet before it can attract it. It is
useless for a parent to try to teach gentleness to her children when
she herself is cross and irritable. The child who is told to be
truthful and who hears a parent lie cleverly to escape some little
social unpleasantness is not going to cling very zealously to truth.
The parent's words say "don't lie," the influence of the parent's life
says "do lie."
No man can ever isolate himself to evade this constant power of
influence, as no single corpuscle can rebel and escape from the general
course of the blood. No individual is so insignificant as to be without
influence. The changes in our varying moods are all recorded in the
delicate barometers of the lives of others. We should ever let our
influence filter through human love and sympathy. We should not be
merely an influence,--we should be an inspiration. By our very presence
we should be a tower of strength to the hungering human souls around
us.
IV
The Dignity of Self-Reliance
Self-confidence, without self-reliance, is as useless as a cooking
recipe,--without food. Self-confidence sees the possibilities of the
individual; self-reliance realizes them. Self-confidence sees the angel
in the unhewn block of marble; self-reliance carves it out for himself.
The man who is self-reliant says ever: "No one can realize my
possibilities for me, but me; no one can make me good or evil but
myself." He works out his own salvation,--financially, socially,
mentally, physically, and morally. Life is an individual problem that
man must solve for himself. Nature accepts no vicarious sacrifice, no
vicarious service. Nature never recognizes a proxy vote. She has
nothing to do with middle-men,--she deals only with the individual.
Nature is constantly seeking to show man that he is his own best
friend, or his own worst enemy. Nature gives man the option on which he
will be to himself.
All the athletic exercises in the world are of no value to the
individual unless he compel those bars and dumb-bells to yield to him,
in strength and muscle, the power for which he, himself, pays in time
and effort. He can never develop his muscles by sending his valet to a
gymnasium.
The medicine-chests of the world are powerless, in all the united
efforts, to help the individual until he reach out and take for himself
what is needed for his individual weakness.
All the religions of the world are but speculations in morals, mere
theories of salvation, until the individual realize that he must save
himself by relying on the law of truth, as he sees it, and living his
life in harmony with it, as fully as he can. But religion is not a
Pullman car, with soft-cushioned seats, where he has but to pay for his
ticket,--and some one else does all the rest. In religion, as in all
other great things, he is ever thrown back on his self-reliance. He
should accept all helps, but,--he must live his own life. He should not
feel that he is a mere passenger; he is the engineer, and the train is
his life. We must rely on ourselves, live our own lives, or we merely
drift through existence,--losing all that is best, all that is
greatest, all that is divine.
All that others can do for us is to give us opportunity. We must ever
be prepared for the opportunity when it comes, and to go after it and
find it when it does not come, or that opportunity is to us,--nothing.
Life is but a succession of opportunities. They are for good or evil,--
as we make them.