This is so helpful and so useful a truth that I feel it necessary to
repeat it in many ways. Fear brings resistance, resistance impedes
our progress. Our faculties are paralyzed by lack of confidence, and
confidence is the result of a true consciousness of our powers when
in harmony with law. Often the fear of not accomplishing what is
before us is the _only_ thing that stands in our way.
If we put all hurry, whether it be an immediate hurry to catch a
train, or the hurry of years toward the accomplishment of the main
objects of our lives,--if we put it all under the clear light of
this truth, it will eventually relieve us of a strain which is
robbing our vitality to no end.
First, the times that we _must_ hurry should be minimized. In nine
cases out of ten the necessity for hurry comes only from our own
attitude of mind, and from no real need whatever. In the tenth case
we must learn to hurry with our muscles, and not with our nerves,
or, I might better say, we must hurry without excitement. To hurry
quietly is to most people an unknown thing, but when hurry is a
necessity, the process of successive effort in it should be pleasant
and refreshing.
If in the act of needful hurry we are constantly teaching ourselves
to stop resistance by saying over and over, through whatever we may
be doing, "I am perfectly willing to lose that train, I am willing
to lose it, I am willing to lose it," that will help to remove the
resistance, and so help us to learn how to make haste quietly.
But the reader will say, "How can I make myself willing when I am
not willing?"
The answer is that if you know that your unwillingness to lose the
train is preventing you from catching it, you certainly will see the
efficacy of being willing, and you will do all in your power toward
yielding to common sense. Unwillingness is resistance,--resistance
in the mind contracts the muscles, and such contraction prevents our
using the muscles freely and easily. Therefore let us be willing.
Of course there, is a lazy, selfish indifference to catching a
train, or accomplishing anything else, which leaves the tendency to
hurry out of some temperaments altogether, but with that kind of a
person we are not dealing now. And such indifference is the absolute
opposite of the wholesome indifference in which there is no touch of
laziness or selfishness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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