Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 209, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 September 1918 — LIVE ALL TOO FAST [ARTICLE]

LIVE ALL TOO FAST

Many Constantly In a Fever of Movement One of Man's Greatest Mistakes Is to Allow Himself to Be Constantly Under Pressure and Intense Nervous Strain. Some of us are trying to live our lives all at once. We would cramp the slow development of years into the coming month or week; we would compress the work of an hour into the next five minutes. Nature —patient, tireless, cunning laborer that she is—does not favor this plan. She takes her time —“Because it is hersi” some one makes prompt answer. “She has command of all the’time there is. She, can be as deliberate as she chooses. We must make haste because our little lives are so soon clipped off. The darkness too early rounds our day. Our work must be put through with speed and under pressure or we shall not finish.” The best work even by these feeble . mortal hands and minds of ours is done not in a fever but in a calm. Art (and the exception proves the rule) achieves most nobly when it achieves with tranquility. The personal circumstances of the artist may be distressing. He rises above them. His dream translates him to the skies above his mundane' environment. His passion for the truth leads him to forget that he is poor and hungry and misunderstood. He writes his book or paints his picture or composes his sonata in a land where it Is always summer and the skies are blue and tears are never shed and none ever dies. By the force of a creative imagination, he establishes for himself 'a new Heaven and a new earth, and his spirit Is tranquil because it is triumphant over the pinching and gnawing circumstances. Artist or artisan, each of us must learn to make the pilgrimage a step at a time. Let not an anxious forecast corrugate the brow with the thought of a morrow sufficient unto Itself. Epicurean delight, lives for the moment; a man’s more serious purpose in existence wbuld often do well to follow the example. We can be sure as to what we wish to do with our lives; we can have a great and generous aim; we can appoint a goal and know the point we wish to reach and the why by which we are proceeding. But the miles we measure forward with the spiritual eye are not to be o’erleaped in the next second. We must plod. We must be content with a wayside inn tonight, and the next* night, and many nights, perhaps, before we reach our haven and our home. It will hot do to disparage this goodly earth as a vale of tears for all the sorrow and all the blackness that we see. The earth is full of fallible people like ourselves, trying and coming to grief and rising to give battle again in the inextinguishable hope of victory. We are more alike than we realize. We are a marching anriy, with leaders whom we must obey. Like good soldiers we must keep the cadence with the rest. If we grow careless and straggle, we dislocate the whole proceeding. We came' into this world bound to be submissive to its discipline. To defy the natural laws is only to be miserable and to make misery for others. If war shall teach us to respond with promptness to a command, out of its horrors will be born a blessing.—Philadelphia Public Ledger.