How Not To Worry: A 1934 Guide to Mastering Life
"We must gain victory, not by assaulting the walls, but by accepting them."
As far as vintage finds go, they hardly get more fortuitous than You Can Master Life (public library) – a marvelous 1934 compendium of sort-of-philosophical, sort-of-self-helpy, at times charmingly dated, other times refreshingly timeless advice on cultivating "the power to think, to create, to influence and be influenced by others, and to love," in the spirit of the 1949 gem How To Avoid Work.
Though written by a Christian pastor named James Gordon Gilkey
and thus a little too God-heavy for these corners of the internet, the slim volume shares a good amount in common with Alain de Botton's modern-day advocacy of the secular sermon. Take, for instance, Gilkey's advice in a chapter titled "Breaking the Grip of Worry." He cites a "Worry Table" created by one of the era's humorists – most likely Mark Twain, who is often quoted, though never with a specific source, as having said, "I've had a lot of
worries in my life, most of which never happened." The table was designed to distinguish between justified and unjustified worries:
On studying his chronic fears this man found they fell into five fairly distinct classifications:
1. Worries about disasters which, as later events proved, never happened. About 40% of my anxieties.
2. Worries about decisions I had made in the past, decisions about which I could now of course do nothing. About 30% of my anxieties.
3. Worries about possible sickness and a possible nervous breakdown, neither of which materialized. About 12% of my worries.
4. Worries about my children and my friends, worries arising from the fact I forgot these people have an ordinary amount of common sense. About 10% of my worries.
5. Worries that have a real foundation. Possibly 8% of the total.
Gilkey then prescribes:
What, of this man, is the first step in the conquest of anxiety? It is to limit his worrying to the few perils in his fifth group.
This simple act will eliminate 92% of his fears. Or, to figure the matter differently, it will leave him free from worry 92% of the time.
The concept of the worry table is strikingly reminiscent – and, one has to wonder, might have inspired – artist Andrew Kuo's elaborate 2008 graphic My Wheel of Worry:
(Of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald intuited the basic premise of the table when he sent his daughter Scottie an itemized list of the things in life to worry and not worry about.)
In a later chapter, titled "Doing One's Work Under Difficulties," Gilkey offers some related advice which, on the one hand, bears that wise Buddhist-like mindset of living with sheer awareness but, on the other, makes a questionable case against introspection and the enormous enrichment of "living the questions":
We should make ourselves stop trying to explain our own difficulties. Our first impulse is to try to account for them,
figure out why what has happened did happen. Sometimes such an effort is beneficial: more often it is distinctly harmful. It leads to introspection, self-pity, and vain regret; and almost invariably it creates within us a dangerous mood of confusion and despair. Many of life's hard situations cannot be explained. They can only be endured, mastered, ad gradually forgotten. Once we learn this truth, once we resolve to use all our energies managing life rather than trying to explain life, we take the first and most obvious step toward significant accomplishment.
In the following chapter, "Learning to Adjust," Gilkey revisits the subject through the lens of aging:
Only as we yield to the inexorable, only as we accept the situations which we find ourselves powerless to change, can
we free ourselves from fatal inward tensions, and acquire that inward quietness amid which we can seek – and usually find – ways by which our limitations can be made at least partially endurable.
[…]
Why is [this] so difficult for most people? because most of us were told in childhood that the way to conquer a difficulty is to fight it and demolish it. That theory is, of course, the one that should be taught to young people. Many of the difficulties we encounter in youth are not permanent; and the combination of a heroic courage, a resolute will, and a tireless persistence will often – probably usually – break them down. Bu tin later years the essential elements in the situation change. We find in our little world prison-walls which no amount of battering will demolish. Within those walls we must spend our day – spend them happily, or resentfully. Under these new circumstances we must deliberately reverse our youthful technique. We must gain victory, not by assaulting the walls, but by accepting them. Only when this surrender is made can
we assure ourselves of inward quietness, and locate the net step on the road to ultimate victory.
Complement You Can Master Life with a contemporary counterpart of sorts, the wonderful and wonderfully useful How To Stay Sane, then wash down with a verse-by-verse neuropsychology reading of Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy."
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD In a 1933 letter to his 11-year-old daughter Scottie, F. Scott Fitzgerald produced this poignant and wise list of things to worry, not worry, and think about, found in the altogether excellent F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters:
Things to worry about:
Worry about courage
Worry about Cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship
Worry about…
Things not to worry about:
Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions
Things to think about:
What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in
regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get
along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I
neglecting it?
How To Stay Sane:
The Art of Revising Your Inner Storytelling by Maria Popova
“Our stories give shape to our inchoate, disparate,
fleeting impressions of everyday life.”
“[I] pray to Jesus to preserve my sanity,”
Jack Kerouac professed in discussing his
writing routine. But those of us who fall on
the more secular end of the spectrum might need a slightly more potent sanity-
preservation tool than prayer. That’s precisely
what writer and psychotherapist Philippa
Perry offers in How To Stay Sane (public
library; UK), part of The School of Life’s wonderful series reclaiming the traditional
self-help genre as intelligent, non-self-helpy,
yet immensely helpful guides to modern living.
At the heart of Perry’s argument — in line with neurologist Oliver
Sacks’s recent meditation on memory and how “narrative truth,”
rather than “historical truth,” shapes our impression of the world — is
the recognition that stories make us human and learning to reframe
our interpretations of reality is key to our experience of life:
Our stories give shape to our inchoate, disparate, fleeting
impressions of everyday life. They bring together the past and the
future into the present to provide us with structures for working
towards our goals. They give us a sense of identity and, most
importantly, serve to integrate the feelings of our right brain with the
language of our left.
[…]
We are primed to use stories. Part of our survival as a species
depended upon listening to the stories of our tribal elders as they
shared parables and passed down their experience and the wisdom
of those who went before. As we get older it is our short-term
memory that fades rather than our long-term memory. Perhaps we
have evolved like this so that we are able to tell the younger
generation about the stories and experiences that have formed us
which may be important to subsequent generations if they are to
thrive.
I worry, though, about what might happen to our minds if most of
the stories we hear are about greed, war and atrocity.
Perry goes on to cite research indicating that people who watch
television for more than four hours a day see themselves as far more
likely to fall victim in a violent incident in the forthcoming week than their peers who watch less than two hours a day. Just like E. B. White
advocated for the responsibility of the writer to “to lift people up, not
lower them down,” so too is our responsibility as the writers of our
own life-stories to avoid the well-documented negativity bias of
modern media — because, as artist Austin Kleon wisely put it, “you
are a mashup of what you let into your life.” Perry writes:
Be careful which stories you expose yourself to.
[…]
The meanings you find, and the stories you hear, will have an
impact on how optimistic you are: it’s how we evolved. … If you do
not know how to draw positive meaning from what happens in life,
the neural pathways you need to appreciate good news will never
fire up.
[…]
The trouble is, if we do not have a mind that is used to hearing good
news, we do not have the neural pathways to process such news.
Yet despite the adaptive optimism bias of the human brain, Perry
argues a positive outlook is a practice — and one that requires
mastering the art of vulnerability and increasing our essential
tolerance for uncertainty:
You may find that you have been telling yourself that practicing
optimism is a risk, as though, somehow, a positive attitude will
invite disaster and so if you practice optimism it may increase your
feelings of vulnerability. The trick is to increase your tolerance for
vulnerable feelings, rather than avoid them altogether.
[…]
Optimism does not mean continual happiness, glazed eyes and a
fixed grin. When I talk about the desirability of optimism I do not
mean that we should delude ourselves about reality. But practicing
optimism does mean focusing more on the positive fall-out of an
event than on the negative. … I am not advocating the kind of
optimism that means you blow all your savings on a horse running
at a hundred to one; I am talking about being optimistic enough to
sow some seeds in the hope that some of them will germinate and
grow into flowers.
Another key obstruction to our sanity is our chronic aversion to being wrong, entwined with our damaging fear of the unfamiliar. Perry
cautions:
We all like to think we keep an open mind and can change our
opinions in the light of new evidence, but most of us seem to be
geared to making up our minds very quickly. Then we process
further evidence not with an open mind but with a filter, only
acknowledging the evidence that backs up our original impression.
It is too easy for us to fall into the rap of believing that being right is
more important than being open to what might be.
If we practice detachment from our thoughts we learn to observe
them as though we are taking a bird’s eye view of our own thinking.
When we do this, we might find that our thinking belongs to an
older, and different, story to the one we are now living.
Perry concludes:
We need to look at the repetitions in the stories we tell ourselves
[and] at the process of the stories rather than merely their surface
content. Then we can begin to experiment with changing the filter
through which we look at the world, start to edit the story and thus
regain flexibility where we have been getting stuck.
Complement How To Stay Sane with radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm
Reich’s 1948 list of the six rules for creative sanity.