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Page 10
"What? I am to cultivate my mind in the street, on the platform, in
the train, and in the crowded street again?" Precisely. Nothing
simpler! No tools required! Not even a book. Nevertheless, the
affair is not easy.
When you leave your house, concentrate your mind on a subject (no
matter what, to begin with). You will not have gone ten yards
before your mind has skipped away under your very eyes and is
larking round the corner with another subject.
Bring it back by the scruff of the neck. Ere you have reached the
station you will have brought it back about forty times. Do not
despair. Continue. Keep it up. You will succeed. You cannot by
any chance fail if you persevere. It is idle to pretend that your
mind is incapable of concentration. Do you not remember that morning
when you received a disquieting letter which demanded a very
carefully-worded answer? How you kept your mind steadily on the
subject of the answer, without a second's intermission, until you
reached your office; whereupon you instantly sat down and wrote the
answer? That was a case in which *you* were roused by circumstances
to such a degree of vitality that you were able to dominate your
mind like a tyrant. You would have no trifling. You insisted that
its work should be done, and its work was done.
By the regular practice of concentration (as to which there is no
secret--save the secret of perseverance) you can tyrannise over
your mind (which is not the highest part of *you*) every hour of the
day, and in no matter what place. The exercise is a very convenient
one. If you got into your morning train with a pair of dumb-bells
for your muscles or an encyclopaedia in ten volumes for your
learning, you would probably excite remark. But as you walk in the
street, or sit in the corner of the compartment behind a pipe, or
"strap-hang" on the Subterranean, who is to know that you are
engaged in the most important of daily acts? What asinine boor can
laugh at you?
I do not care what you concentrate on, so long as you concentrate.
It is the mere disciplining of the thinking machine that counts.
But still, you may as well kill two birds with one stone, and
concentrate on something useful. I suggest--it is only a
suggestion--a little chapter of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus.
Do not, I beg, shy at their names. For myself, I know nothing more
"actual," more bursting with plain common-sense, applicable to the
daily life of plain persons like you and me (who hate airs, pose,
and nonsense) than Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. Read a chapter--
and so short they are, the chapters!--in the evening and
concentrate on it the next morning. You will see.
Yes, my friend, it is useless for you to try to disguise the fact.
I can hear your brain like a telephone at my ear. You are saying to
yourself: "This fellow was doing pretty well up to his seventh
chapter. He had begun to interest me faintly. But what he says
about thinking in trains, and concentration, and so on, is not for
me. It may be well enough for some folks, but it isn't in my line."
It is for you, I passionately repeat; it is for you. Indeed, you
are the very man I am aiming at.
Throw away the suggestion, and you throw away the most precious
suggestion that was ever offered to you. It is not my suggestion.
It is the suggestion of the most sensible, practical, hard-headed
men who have walked the earth. I only give it you at second-hand.
Try it. Get your mind in hand. And see how the process cures half
the evils of life--especially worry, that miserable, avoidable,
shameful disease--worry!
VIII
THE REFLECTIVE MOOD
The exercise of concentrating the mind (to which at least half an
hour a day should be given) is a mere preliminary, like scales on
the piano. Having acquired power over that most unruly member of
one's complex organism, one has naturally to put it to the yoke.
Useless to possess an obedient mind unless one profits to the
furthest possible degree by its obedience. A prolonged primary
course of study is indicated.
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