Sleep Story: How To Stop Worrying & Start Living: Ch 6 & 7

Enjoy this sleep story to help you drift off into a peaceful slumber while hearing motivational suggestions authored by Dale Carnegie. His book, "How To Stop Worrying and Start Living" is a classic written in 1948 and offers a plan to help us make the most of our lives, be productive and thrive in the present moment. This reading covers the beginning of Part 3 How To Break The Worry Habit Before It Breaks You. Chapter 6 and 7 discuss how to not worry and sweat the small things.

Transcript

Hello,

My name is Hillary LaFawn.

I am so grateful that you've joined me today to explore chapters six and seven of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie.

Enjoy this sleep story to help relax your mind and body for a great night's sleep.

Before we begin,

Settle yourself in your bed and find your most comfortable position.

Take a few deep,

Long breaths and feel the gentle,

Soothing support of your pillows,

Sheets and blankets.

Let them cradle your body as you relax and settle in.

Let's begin.

Part three,

How to break the worry habit before it breaks you.

Chapter six,

How to crowd worry out of your mind.

I shall never forget one night when Marion J.

Douglas was a student in one of my classes.

I have not used his real name.

He requested me for personal reasons not to reveal his identity.

But here is his real story as he told it to the class.

He told us how tragedy had struck at his home not once but twice.

The first time he had lost his five-year-old daughter,

A child he adored.

He and his wife thought they couldn't endure the first loss.

But as he said,

Ten months later,

God gave us another little girl and she died in five days.

This double bereavement was almost too much to bear.

I couldn't take it,

This father told us.

I couldn't sleep.

I couldn't eat.

I couldn't rest or relax.

My nerves were utterly shaken and my confidence gone.

At last he went to doctors.

One recommended sleeping pills and another recommended a trip.

He tried both but neither remedy helped.

He said,

My body felt as if it were encased in a vice and the jaws of the vice were being drawn tighter and tighter.

The tension of grief,

If you have ever been paralyzed by sorrow,

You know what he meant.

But thank God I had one child left,

A four-year-old son.

He gave me the solution to my problem.

One afternoon as I sat around feeling sorry for myself,

He asked,

Daddy,

Will you build a boat for me?

I was in no mood to build a boat.

In fact,

I was in no mood to do anything.

But my son is a persistent little fellow.

I had to give in.

Building that toy boat took about three hours.

By the time it was finished,

I realized that those three hours spent building the boat were the first hours of mental relaxation and peace that I had had in months.

That discovery jarred me out of my lethargy and caused me to do a bit of thinking,

The first real thinking I had done in months.

I realized that it is difficult to worry while you are busy doing something that requires planning and thinking.

In my case,

Building the boat had knocked worry out of the ring.

So I resolved to keep busy.

The following night,

I went from room to room in the house,

Compiling a list of jobs that ought to be done.

Scores of items needed to be repaired.

Bookcases,

Stair steps,

Storm windows,

Window shades,

Knobs,

Locks,

Leaky faucets.

Astonishing as it seems,

In the course of two weeks,

I had made a list of 242 items that needed attention.

During the last two years,

I have completed most of them.

Besides,

I have filled my life with stimulating activities.

Two nights per week,

I attend adult education classes in New York.

I have gone in for civic activities in my hometown and I am now chairman of the school board.

I attend scores of meetings.

I help collect money for the Red Cross and other activities.

I am so busy now that I have no time for worry.

No time for worry.

That is exactly what Winston Churchill said when he was working 18 hours a day at the height of the war.

When he was asked if he was worried about his tremendous responsibilities,

He said,

I'm too busy.

I have no time for worry.

Charles Kettering was in the same fix when he started out to invent a self-starter for automobiles.

Mr.

Kettering was,

Until retirement,

Vice president of General Motors in charge of the world-famous General Motors Research Corporation.

But in those days,

He was so poor that he had to use the hayloft of a barn as a laboratory.

To buy groceries,

He had to use $1,

500 that his wife had made by giving piano lessons.

Later,

He had to borrow $500 off of his life insurance.

I asked his wife if she wasn't worried at all during that time,

And she said yes.

I was so worried I couldn't sleep,

But Mr.

Kettering wasn't.

He was too absorbed in his work to worry.

The great scientist Pasteur spoke of the peace that is found in libraries and laboratories.

Why is peace found there?

Because the men in libraries and laboratories are usually too absorbed in their task to worry about themselves.

Research men rarely have nervous breakdowns.

They haven't time for such luxuries.

Why does such a simple thing as keeping busy help to drive out our anxiety?

Because of a law.

One of the most fundamental laws ever revealed by psychology.

And that law is that it is utterly impossible for any human mind,

No matter how brilliant,

To think of more than one thing at any given time.

You don't quite believe it.

Very well,

Well then let's try and experiment.

Suppose you lean back right now,

Close your eyes,

And try at the same instant to think of the Statue of Liberty and of what you plan to do tomorrow morning.

Go ahead,

Try it.

You found out,

Didn't you,

That you could focus on either thought in turn,

But never on both simultaneously.

While the same thing is true in the field of emotions,

We cannot be pepped up and enthusiastic about doing something exciting and feel dragged down by worry at the same time.

One kind of emotion drives out the other.

And it was that simple discovery that enabled army psychiatrists to perform such miracles during the Second World War.

When men came out of battle so shaken by the experience that they were called psychoneurotic,

Army doctors prescribed,

Keep them busy as a cure.

Every waking minute of those nerve-shocked men was filled with activity,

Usually outdoor activity such as fishing,

Hunting,

Playing ball,

Golf,

Taking pictures,

Making gardens,

And dancing.

They were given no time for breeding over the terrible experiences.

Occupational therapy is now the term used by psychiatry when work is prescribed as though it were a medicine.

It is not new.

The old Greek physicians were advocating it 500 years before Christ was born.

The Quakers were using it in Philadelphia in Ben Franklin's time.

A man who visited a Quaker sanitarium in 1774 was shocked to see that the patients who were mentally ill were busy spinning flax.

He thought these poor unfortunates were being exploited until the Quakers explained that they found that their patients actually improved when they did a little work.

It was soothing to the nerves.

Any psychiatrist will tell you that work,

Keeping busy,

Is one of the best anesthetics ever known for sick nerves.

Henry W.

Longfellow found that out for himself when he lost his young wife.

His wife had been melting some ceiling wax at a candle one day when her clothes caught on fire.

Longfellow heard her cries and tried to reach her in time,

But she died from the burns.

For a while,

Longfellow was so tortured by the memory of the dreadful experience that he nearly went insane.

But fortunately for him,

His three small children needed his attention.

In spite of his own grief,

Longfellow undertook to be father and mother to his children.

He took them for walks,

Told them stories,

Played games with them,

And immortalized their companionship in the poem,

The Children's Hour.

He also translated Dante,

And all these duties combined kept him so busy that he forgot himself entirely and regained his peace of mind.

As Tennyson declared when he lost his most intimate friend Arthur Hallam,

I must lose myself in action,

Lest I wither in despair.

Most of us have little trouble losing our self in action,

While we have our noses to the grindstone and are doing our day's work,

But the hours after work,

They are the dangerous one.

Just when we're free to enjoy our own leisure and ought to be happiest,

That's when the blue devils of worry attack us.

That's when we begin to wonder whether we're getting anywhere in life.

Whether we're in a rut,

Whether the boss meant anything by that remark he made today,

Or whether we're losing our sex appeal.

When we are not busy,

Our minds tend to become a near vacuum.

Every student of physics knows that nature abhors a vacuum.

The nearest thing to a vacuum that you and I will probably ever see is the inside of an incandescent electric light bulb.

Break that bulb and nature forces air in to fill the theoretically empty space.

Nature also rushes in to fill the vacant mind.

With what?

Usually with emotions.

Why?

Because emotions of worry,

Fear,

Hate,

Jealousy,

And envy are driven by primeval vigor and the dynamic energy of the jungle.

Such emotions are so violent that they tend to drive out of our minds all peaceful,

Happy thoughts and emotions.

James L.

Mercell,

Professor of education,

Teaches college,

Columbia.

He put it very well when he said,

Worry is most apt to ride you ragged,

Not when you're in action,

But when the day's work is done.

Your imagination can run riot then and bring up all sorts of ridiculous possibilities and magnify each little blunder.

At such a time,

He continued,

Your mind is like a motor operating without its load.

It races and threatens to burn out its bearings.

Or even to tear itself to bits.

The remedy for worry is to get completely occupied doing something constructive.

But you don't have to be a college professor to realize this truth and put it into practice.

During the second world war,

I met a housewife from Chicago who told me how she discovered for herself that the remedy for worry is to get completely occupied doing something constructive.

I met this woman and her husband in a dining car while I was traveling from New York to my farm in Missouri.

This couple told me that their son had joined the armed forces the day after Pearl Harbor.

The woman told me that she had almost wrecked her health worrying over her only son.

Where was he?

Was he safe or in action?

Would he be wounded,

Killed?

When I asked her how she overcame her worry,

She replied,

I got busy.

She told me that at first she had dismissed her maid and tried to keep busy by doing all the housework herself,

But that didn't help much.

The trouble was,

She said,

That I could do all my housework almost mechanically without using my mind.

So I kept on worrying while making the beds and washing the dishes.

I realized I needed some new kind of work that would keep me busy both mentally and physically every hour of the day.

So I took a job as a saleswoman in a large department store.

That did it,

She said.

I immediately found myself in a whirlwind of activity,

Customers swarming around me,

Asking for prices,

Sizes,

Colors,

Never a second to think of anything except my immediate duty.

And when I came,

I could think of nothing except getting off my aching feet.

As soon as I ate dinner,

I fell into bed and instantly became unconscious.

I had neither the time nor the energy for worry.

She discovered for herself that John Cowper Pose meant what he said in the art of forgetting the unpleasant,

A certain uncomfortable security,

A certain profound inner peace,

A kind of happy numbness soothes the nerves of the human animal when absorbed in its allocated task.

And what a blessing that is.

Osa Johnson,

One of the world's most famous woman explorers,

Told me how she found release from worry and grief.

You may have read the story of her life.

It is called I Married Adventure.

If any woman ever married adventure,

She certainly did.

Martin Johnson married her when she was 16 and lifted her feet off the sidewalks of Chanute,

Kansas,

And set them down in the wild jungle trails of Borneo.

For a quarter of a century,

This Kansas couple traveled all over the world,

Making motion pictures of the vanishing wildlife of Asia and Africa.

Some years later,

They were on a lecture tour showing their famous film.

They took a plane out of Denver,

Bound for the coast.

The plane plunged into the mountain.

Martin Johnson was killed instantly.

The doctor said Osa would never leave her bed again,

But they didn't know Osa Johnson.

Three months later,

She was in a wheelchair lecturing before large audiences.

In fact,

She addressed over 100 audiences that season,

All from a wheelchair.

When I asked her why she did it,

She replied,

I did it so that I would have no time for sorrow and worry.

Osa Johnson had discovered the same truth that Tennyson had sung about a century earlier.

I must lose myself in action,

Lest I wither in despair.

Admiral Byrd discovered the same truth when he lived all alone for five months in a shack that was literally buried in the great glacial ice cap that covers the South Pole.

An ice cap that holds nature's oldest secrets.

An ice cap covering an unknown continent larger than the United States and Europe combined.

Admiral Byrd spent five months there alone.

No other living creature of any kind existed within 100 miles.

The cold was so intense that he could hear his breath freeze and crystallize as the wind blew it past his ears.

In his book alone,

Admiral Byrd tells all about those five months he spent in bewildering and soul-shattering darkness.

The days were as black as the nights.

He had to keep busy to preserve his insanity.

That night,

He says,

Before blowing out the lantern,

I formed the habit of blocking out the tomorrow's work.

It was a case of assigning myself an hour,

Say,

To the escape tunnel,

Half an hour to leveling drift,

An hour to straightening up the fuel drums,

An hour to cutting bookshelves in the walls of the food tunnel,

And two hours to renewing a broken bridge in the man-hauling sledge.

It was wonderful,

He said,

To be able to dole out time in this way.

It brought me an extraordinary sense of command over myself.

And he adds,

Without that or an equivalent,

The days would have just been without purpose.

And without purpose,

They would have ended,

As such days always end,

In disintegration.

Note the last sentence again.

Without purpose,

The days would have ended,

As such days always end,

In disintegration.

If you and I are worried,

Let's remember that we can use good old-fashioned work as a medicine.

That was said by no less an authority than the late Dr.

Richard C.

Cabot,

Formerly professor of the clinical medicine at Harvard.

In his book,

What Men Live By,

Dr.

Cabot says,

As a physician,

I have had the happiness of seeing work cure many persons who have suffered from trembling palsy of the soul,

Which results from overmastering doubts,

Hesitations,

Vacillation,

And fear.

Courage given us by our work is like the self-reliance which Emerson has made forever glorious.

If you and I don't keep busy,

If we sit around and brood,

We will hatch out a whole flock of what Charles Darwin used to call the Wibbergivers.

And the Wibbergivers are nothing but old-fashioned gremlins that will run us hollow and destroy our power of action and our power of will.

I know a businessman in New York who fought the Wibbergivers by getting so busy that he had no time to fret and stew.

His name is Trumper Longman.

He was a student in one of my classes,

And his talk on conquering worry was so interesting,

So impressive,

That I asked him to have a late supper with me after class.

And we sat in a restaurant long past midnight discussing his experiences.

Here is the story he told me 18 years ago.

I was so worried I had insomnia.

I was tense,

Irritated,

And jittery.

I felt I was headed for a nervous breakdown.

I had reacted,

And I had reason to be worried.

I was treasurer of the Crown Fruit and Extract Company.

We had half a million dollars invested in strawberries packed in gallon tins.

For 20 years,

We had been selling these gallon tins of strawberries to manufacturers of ice cream.

Suddenly,

Our sales dropped because the big ice cream makers,

Such as National Dairy and Borden's,

Were rapidly increasing their production and were saving money and time by buying strawberries packed in barrels.

Not only were we left with half a million dollars in berries we couldn't sell,

But we were also under contract to buy a million dollars more of the strawberries in the next 12 months.

We had already borrowed $350,

000 from the banks.

We couldn't possibly pay off or renew these loans.

No wonder I was worried.

I rushed out to Watsonville,

California,

Where our factory was located,

And tried to persuade our president that conditions had changed,

That we were facing ruin.

He refused to believe it.

He blamed our New York office for all the trouble.

Poor salesmanship.

After days of pleading,

I finally persuaded him to stop packing more strawberries and to sell our new supply of the fresh berry market in San Francisco.

That almost solved our problem.

I should have been able to stop worrying then,

But I couldn't.

Worry is a habit,

And I had the habit.

When I returned to New York,

I began worrying about everything.

The cherries we were buying in Italy,

The pineapples we were buying in Hawaii,

And so on.

I was tense,

Jittery,

Couldn't sleep,

And as I've already said,

I was heading for a nervous breakdown.

In despair,

I adopted a way of life that cured my insomnia and stopped my worries.

I got busy.

I got so busy with problems demanding all of my faculties that I had no time to worry.

I'd been working seven hours a day,

And now I began working 15 to 16 hours a day.

I got down to the office every morning at 8 o'clock and stayed there every night until almost midnight.

I took on new duties,

New responsibilities.

When I got home at midnight,

I was so exhausted when I fell in bed that I became unconscious in a few seconds.

I kept up this program for about three months.

I had broken the habit of worry by that time,

So I returned to a normal working day of seven or eight hours.

This event occurred 18 years ago.

I have never been troubled with insomnia or worry since then.

George Bernard Shaw was right.

He summed it all up when he said,

The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.

So don't bother to think about it.

Spit on your hands and get busy.

Your blood will start circulating,

Your mind will start ticking,

And pretty soon this whole positive upsurge of life in your body will drive worry from your mind.

Get busy,

Keep busy.

It's the cheapest kind of medicine there is on earth and one of the best.

To break the worry habit,

Here is rule number one.

Keep busy.

The worried person must lose himself in action lest he wither in despair.

Rule number seven,

Don't let the Beatles get you down.

Here is a dramatic story that I'll probably remember as long as I live.

It was told to me by Robert Moore of Mableton,

New Jersey.

I learned the biggest lesson of my life in March 1945,

He said.

I learned at under 276 feet of water off the coast of Indonesia.

I was one of 88 men aboard the submarine Bayah SS-318.

We had discovered by radar that a small Japanese convoy was coming our way.

As daybreak approached,

We submerged to attack.

I saw through the periscope a Japanese destroyer escort,

A tanker,

And a mine liar.

We fired three torpedoes at the destroyer escort but missed.

Something went haywire in the mechanics of each torpedo.

The destroyer not knowing that she had been attacked continued on.

We were getting ready to attack the last ship,

The mine liar,

When suddenly she turned and came directly at us.

A Japanese plane had spotted us under 60 feet of water and had radioed our position to the Japanese mine liar.

We went down to 150 feet to avoid detection and rigged for the depth charge.

We put extra bolts on the hatches and in order to make our sub absolutely silent,

We turned off the fans,

The cooling system,

And all electrical gear.

Three minutes later,

All hell broke loose.

Six depth charges exploded all around us and pushed us to the ocean floor.

A depth of 276 feet.

We were terrified.

To be attacked in less than a thousand feet of water is dangerous.

Less than 500 is almost always fatal.

We were being attacked in a trifle more than half of 500 feet of water.

Just about knee deep as far as safety was concerned.

For 15 hours,

That Japanese mine liar kept dropping depth charges.

If a depth charge explodes within 17 feet of a sub,

The concussion will blow a hole in it.

Scores of these depth charges exploded within 50 feet of us.

We were ordered to secure,

To lie quietly in our bunks and remain calm.

I was so terrified I could hardly breathe.

This is death,

I kept telling myself over and over.

This is death.

This is death.

With the fans and cooling system turned off,

The air inside the sub was over 100 degrees.

But I was so chilled with fear that I put on a sweater and a fur line jacket,

And I still trembled with cold.

My teeth chatter.

I broke out in a cold clammy sweat.

The attack continued for 15 hours,

Then ceased suddenly.

Apparently,

The Japanese mine layer had exhausted its supply of depth charges and steamed away.

Those 15 hours of attack seemed like 15 million years.

All my life passed before me in review.

I remembered all the bad things I had done,

All the little absurd things I had worried about.

I had been a bank clerk before I joined the Army and the Navy.

I had worried about the long hours,

The poor pay,

The poor prospects of advancement.

I had worried because I couldn't own my own home,

Couldn't buy a new car,

Couldn't buy my wife nice clothes.

How I had hated my old boss who was always nagging and scolding.

I remembered how I would come home at night sore and grouchy and quarrel with my wife over trifles.

I had worried about a scar on my forehead,

A nasty cut from an auto accident.

How big all those worries seemed years ago,

But how absurd they seemed when depth charges were threatening to blow me to kingdom come.

I promised myself then and there that if I ever saw the sun and stars again,

I would never,

Never,

Never worry again.

I learned more about the art of living in those 15 terrible hours and that submarine that I had learned by studying books for four years in Syracuse University.

We often face the major disasters of life bravely and then let the trifles,

The pain in the necks get us down.

For example,

Samuel Pepe's tells in his diary about seeing Sir Harry Vane's head chopped off in London.

As Sir Harry mounted the platform,

He was not pleading for his life,

But was pleading for the executioner not to hit the painful boil on his neck.

That was another thing that Admiral Byrd discovered down that terrible cold and darkness of the polar nights.

That his men fussed more about the palms and the pains in their neck than about the big things.

They bore without complaining the dangers,

The hardships,

And the cold that was often 80 degrees below zero.

What says Admiral Byrd,

I know of bunk mates who quit speaking because each suspected the other of inching his gear into the other's allotted space.

And I knew of one who could not eat unless he could find a place in the mess hall out of sight of the fletcheress who solemnly chewed his food 28 times before swallowing.

In a polar camp says Admiral Byrd,

Little things like that have the power to drive even disciplined men to the edge of insanity.

And you might have added,

Admiral Byrd,

That little things in marriage drive people to the edge of insanity and cause half the heartaches of the world.

At least that is what the authorities say.

For example,

Judge Joseph Sabbath of Chicago,

After acting as arbiter in more than 40,

000 unhappy marriages declared,

Trivalties are at the bottom of most marital unhappiness.

Fully half the cases in our criminal courts originate in little things.

Barroom bravado,

Domestic wrangling,

An insulting remark,

A disparaging word,

A rude action,

These are the little things that lead to assault and murder.

Very few of us are cruelly and greatly wronged.

It is the small blows to our self-esteem,

The indignities,

The little jolts to our vanity,

Which cause half the heartaches in the world.

When Eleanor Roosevelt was first married,

She worried for days because her new cook had served a poor meal.

But if that happened now,

I would shrug my shoulders and forget it,

She said.

Good.

That is acting like an adult emotionally.

Even Catherine the Great,

An absolute autocrat,

Used to laugh the thing off when the cook spoiled a meal.

Miss Carnegie and I had dinner at a friend's house in Chicago while serving the meat.

He did something wrong.

I didn't notice it,

And I wouldn't have even cared if I noticed it.

But his wife saw it,

Jumped down his throat right in front of us.

John,

Watch what you are doing.

Can't you ever learn to serve properly?

Then she said to us,

He's always making mistakes.

He just doesn't try.

Maybe he didn't try to carve,

But I certainly give him credit for trying to live with her for 20 years.

Frankly,

I would rather have eaten a couple of hot dogs with mustard and an atmosphere of peace than to have dined on pecking duck and shark fins while listening to her scolding.

Shortly after that experience,

Miss Carnegie and I had some friends at our home for dinner.

Just before they arrived,

Miss Carnegie found that three of the napkins didn't match the tablecloth.

I rushed to the cook,

She told me later,

And found out that the other three napkins had gone to the laundry.

The guests were at the door,

And there was no time to change.

I felt like bursting into tears.

All I could think was,

Why did this stupid mistake have to spoil my whole evening?

Then I thought,

Well,

Why let it?

I went into dinner,

Determined to have a good time,

And I did.

I would much rather our friends think I'm a sloppy housekeeper,

She told me,

Than a nervous bad tempered one.

And anyhow,

As far as I could make it,

No one noticed the napkins.

A well-known legal maxim says,

The law does not concern itself with trifles,

And neither should the worrier if he wants peace of mind.

Much of the time,

All we need to overcome the annoyance of trifles is to effect a shifting of emphasis.

Set up a new and pleasurable point of view in the mind.

My friend Homer Croy,

Who wrote,

They Had to See Paris,

And a dozen other books,

Gives an example of how this can be done.

He used to be driven half crazy while working on a book by the rattling of radiators in his New York apartment.

The steam would bang and sizzle,

And he would sizzle with irritation as he sat down to his desk.

And says Homer Croy,

I went with some friends on a camping expedition.

While listening to the limbs crackling in the roaring fire,

I thought about how much that sounded like the crackling of the radiators.

Why should I like this and hate the other?

When I went home,

I said to myself,

The crackling of the limbs in the fire was a pleasant sound.

The sound of the radiators is about the same.

I'll go to sleep and not worry about the noise.

And I did.

For a few days I was conscious of the radiators,

But soon I forgot all about them.

And so it is with many petty worries.

We dislike them and get into a stew,

All because we exaggerate their importance.

Disraeli said,

Life is too short to be little.

Those words,

Said Andre Moro in this week's magazine,

Have helped me through so many painful experiences.

Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget.

Here we are on this earth with only a few more decades to live,

And we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that in a year's time will be forgotten by us and by everyone.

Now let us devote our life to worthwhile actions and feelings,

To great thoughts,

Real affections,

And enduring undertakings.

For life is too short to be little.

Even so illustrious a figure as Rudyard Kipling forgot at times that life is too short to be little.

The result?

He and his brother-in-law fought the most famous court battle in history of Vermont,

A battle so celebrated that a book has been written about it.

Rudyard Kipling's Vermont feud.

The story goes like this.

Kipling married a Vermont girl,

Built a lovely home,

Settled down,

And expected to spend the rest of his life there.

His brother-in-law became Kipling's best friend.

Then Kipling bought some land with the understanding that he'd be allowed to cut hay off each season.

One day they found Kipling laying out on a flower garden on the hay field,

And his blood boiled.

He hit the ceiling.

The air over Green Mountains of Vermont turned blue.

A few days later when Kipling was out riding his bicycle,

His brother-in-law drove a wagon and a team of horses across the road suddenly and forced Kipling to take a spill.

And Kipling,

The man who wrote,

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs,

And blaming it on you,

He lost his own head and swore out a warrant for their arrest.

A sensational trial followed.

Reporters from the big cities poured down the town.

The news flashed around the world.

Nothing was settled.

This quarreled cause Kipling and his wife to abandon their American home for the rest of their lives.

All that worry and bitterness over a mere trifle,

A load of hay.

Periodically said 24 centuries ago,

Come gentlemen,

We sit too long on trifles.

We do indeed.

Here is one of the most famous stories that Dr.

Harry Emerson Fostick ever told.

A story about the battles won and lost by the giant of the forest.

On the slope of Long's Peak in Colorado lies the realm of a gigantic tree.

Naturalists tell us that it stood for some 400 years.

It was a seedling when Columbus landed at San Salvador and half grown when the pilgrims settled at Plymouth.

During the course of its long life it was struck by lightning 14 times.

It survived them all.

In the end,

However,

An army of beetles attacked the tree and leveled it to the ground.

A giant forest which age had not withered nor lightning blasted nor storm subdued fell at last because beetles so small that a man could crush them between his forefinger and his thumb.

Aren't we all like that battling giant of the forest?

Don't we manage somehow to survive the rare storms and avalanches and lightning blasts of worry only to let our hearts be eaten out by the little beetles?

Little beetles that could be crushed between a finger and a thumb?

To break the worry habit before it breaks you,

Here is rule number two.

Let's not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget.

Remember,

Life is too short to be little.

Thank you for allowing me the precious gift of your time.

Until next time.

Reviews

Volume too low other than that. Great listen. Thank you v much