Sleep Story: How To Stop Worrying & Start Living: Ch 8 & 9

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. Ch 8 discusses the law of averages and Ch 9 discusses co-operating with the inevitable.

Transcript

Hello,

My name is Hilary LaFawn.

I'm so grateful that you've joined me today to explore Chapter 8 and 9 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.

Chapter 8.

A Law that Will Outlaw Many of Your Worries.

As a child,

I grew up on a Missouri farm,

And one day,

While helping my mother pit cherries,

I began to cry.

My mother said,

Dale,

What in the world are you crying about?

I blubbered,

I'm afraid I'm going to be buried alive.

I was full of worries in those days.

When thunderstorms came,

I worried for fear I would be killed by lightning.

When hard times came,

I worried for fear we wouldn't have enough to eat.

I worried for fear I would go to hell when I died.

I was terrified for fear an older boy,

Sam White,

Would cut off my big ears as he threatened to do.

I worried for fear girls would laugh at me if I tipped my hat.

I worried for fear no girl would ever be willing to marry me.

I worried about what I would say to my wife immediately after we were married.

I imagined that we would be married in some country church,

And then get in a surrey with fringe on the top and ride back to the farm.

But how would I be able to keep the conversation going on that ride back to the farm?

How?

How?

I pondered over that earth-shaking problem for many an hour as I walked behind the plow.

As the years went by,

I gradually discovered that 99% of the things I was worried about never happened.

For example,

As I've already said,

I was once terrified by lightning,

But I now know that the chance of me being killed by lightning in any one year are,

According to the National Safety Council,

Only one in 350,

000.

My fear of being buried alive was even more absurd.

I don't imagine that,

Even back in the days before embalming was the rule,

That one person in 10 million was buried alive.

Yet I once cried for fear of it.

One person out of every eight dies of cancer.

If I had wanted something to worry about,

I should have worried about cancer instead of being killed by lightning or being buried alive.

To be sure,

I have been talking about the worries of youth and adolescents.

But many of our adult worries are almost as absurd.

You and I could probably eliminate nine-tenths of our worries right now if we would cease our fretting long enough to discover whether,

By the law of averages,

There was any real justification for our worries.

The most famous insurance company on earth,

Lloyds of London,

Has made countless millions of dollars out of the tendency of everybody to worry about things that rarely happen.

Lloyds of London bets people that the disasters that they are worrying about will never occur.

However,

They don't call it betting.

They call it insurance.

But it is really betting based on the law of averages.

This great insurance firm has been going strong for over two hundred years,

And unless human nature changes,

It will still be going strong fifty centuries from now by insuring shoes and ships and sealing wax against disasters that,

By the law of averages,

Don't happen nearly so often as people imagine.

If we examine the law of averages,

We will often be astounded at the facts we uncover.

For example,

If I knew that during the next five years I would have to fight in a battle as bloody as the battle of Gettysburg,

I would be terrified.

I would take out all the life insurance I could get.

I would drop my will and set all my earthly affairs in order.

I would say,

I'll probably never live through that battle,

So I'd better make the most of the few years I have left.

Yet,

The facts are that,

According to the law of averages,

It is just as dangerous,

Just as fatal,

To try to live from age fifty to age fifty-five in peacetime as it was to fight in the battle of Gettysburg.

What I'm trying to say is this,

In times of peace,

Just as many people die per thousand between the ages of fifty and fifty-five,

As were killed per thousand among the hundred and sixty-three thousand soldiers who fought at Gettysburg.

I wrote several chapters of this book at James Simpson's Numtiga Lodge on the shore of Bow Lake in the Canadian Rockies,

While stopping there one summer,

I met Mr.

And Miss Herbert H.

Salinger of San Francisco.

Miss Salinger,

A poised,

Serene woman,

Gave me the impression that she had never worried.

One evening in front of the roaring fireplace,

I asked her if she had ever been troubled by worry.

Troubled by it,

She said,

My life was almost ruined by it.

Before I learned to conquer worry,

I lived through eleven years of self-made hell.

I was irritable and hot-tempered.

I lived under terrific tension.

I would take the bus every week from my home in San Mateo to shop in San Francisco.

But even while shopping,

I worried myself into a dither.

Maybe I had left the electric iron connected on the ironing board.

Maybe the house had caught fire.

Maybe the maid had run off and left the children.

Maybe they had been out on bicycles and been killed by a car.

In the midst of my shopping,

I would often worry myself into a cold perspiration and rush out and take the bus home to see if everything was all right.

No wonder my first marriage ended in disaster.

My second husband is a lawyer,

A quiet,

Analytical man who never worries about anything.

When I became tense and anxious,

He would say to me,

Relax,

Let's think this out.

What are you really worrying about?

Let's examine the law of averages and see whether or not it is likely to happen.

For example,

I remember the time we were driving from Albuquerque,

New Mexico to the Carlsbad Caverns,

Driving on a dirt road when we were caught in a terrible rainstorm.

The car was slithering and sliding.

We couldn't control it.

I was positive we would slide off into the dishes that flanked the road.

But my husband kept repeating to me,

I am driving very slowly.

Nothing serious is likely to happen.

Even if the car does slide into the ditch,

By the law of averages,

We won't be hurt.

His calmness and confidence quieted me.

One summer we were on a camping trip in the Tucuin Mountain Valley of the Canadian Rockies.

One night we were camping several thousand feet above sea level when a storm threatened to tear our tents to shreds.

The tents were tied with guy ropes to a wooden platform.

The outer tent shook and trembled and screamed and shrieked in the wind.

I expected every minute to see our tent come loose and hurl through the sky.

I was terrified.

But my husband kept saying,

Look my dear,

We are traveling with Brewster's guides.

Brewster's know what they are doing.

They have been pitching tents in these mountains for 60 years.

This tent has been here for many seasons.

It hasn't blown down yet.

And by the law of averages,

It won't blow away tonight.

And even if it does,

We can take shelter in another tent.

So relax.

I did and I slept soundly the entire balance of the night.

A few years ago,

An infantile paralysis epidemic swept over our part of California.

In the old days,

I would have been hysterical.

But my husband persuaded me to act calmly.

We took all the precautions we could.

We kept our children away from crowds,

Away from schools and movies.

By consulting the Board of Health,

We found out that even during the worst infantile paralysis epidemic that California had ever known up until the time,

Only 1,

835 children had been stricken in the entire state of California.

And that the usual number was around 200 or 300.

Tragic as those figures are,

We nevertheless felt that according to the law of averages,

The chances of one child being stricken were remote.

By the law of averages,

It won't happen.

That phrase has destroyed 90% of my worries and it has made the past 20 years of my life beautiful and peaceful beyond my highest expectations.

It has been said that nearly all of our worries and unhappiness come from our imagination and not from our reality.

As I look back across the decades,

I can see that is where most of my worries also came from.

Jim Grant told me that had been his experience too.

He owned the James A.

Grant Distributing Company of New York City.

He ordered from 10 to 15 carloads of Florida and grapefruit oranges at a time.

He told me that he used to torture himself with such thoughts as,

What if there's a train wreck?

What if my fruit is strewn all over the countryside?

What if a bridge collapses as my cars are going over it?

Of course,

The fruit was insured,

But he feared that if he didn't deliver his fruit on time,

He might risk the loss of his market.

He worried so much that he feared he had stomach ulcers and went to a doctor.

The doctor told him there was nothing wrong with him except jumpy nerves.

I saw the light then.

He said and began to ask myself questions.

I asked myself,

Look here Jim Grant,

How many fruit cars have you handled over the years?

The answer was about 25,

000.

Then I asked myself,

How many of those cars were ever wrecked?

The answer was,

Oh maybe five.

Then I said to myself,

Only five out of 25,

000?

Do you know what that means?

A ratio of 5,

000 to one.

In other words,

By the law of averages based on experience,

The chances are very slim.

So what are you worried about?

Then I said to myself,

Well a bridge may collapse.

Then I asked myself,

How many cards have you actually lost from a bridge collapsing?

The answer was none.

Then I said to myself,

Aren't you a fool to be worrying yourself into stomach ulcers over a bridge that has never yet collapsed and over a railroad wreck when the chances are 5,

000 to one against it?

When I looked at it that way,

Jim Grant told me,

I felt pretty silly.

I decided then and there to let the law of averages do the worrying for me.

And I have not been troubled with my stomach ulcers since.

When Al Smith was governor of New York,

I heard him answer the attacks of his political enemies by saying over and over,

Let's examine the record.

Let's examine the record.

Then he proceeded to give the facts.

The next time you and I are worrying about what may happen,

Let's take a tip from wise old Al Smith.

Let's examine the record and see what basis there is.

If any,

For our gnawing anxieties.

That is precisely what Frederick J.

Molstead did when he feared he was lying in his grave.

Here is the story as he told it to one of our classes in New York.

Early in June 1944,

I was laying in a slit trench near Omaha Beach.

I was with the 999th Signal Service Company and we had just dug in in Normandy.

As I looked around at that slit trench,

Just a rectangular hole in the ground,

I said to myself,

This looks just like a grave.

When I lay down and tried to sleep in it,

It felt like a grave.

I couldn't help saying to myself,

Maybe this is my grave.

When the German bombers began coming over at 11 p.

M.

And the bombs started falling,

I was scared stiff.

For the first two or three nights,

I couldn't sleep at all.

By the fourth or fifth night,

I was almost a nervous wreck.

I knew that if I didn't do something,

I would go stark crazy.

So I reminded myself that five nights had passed and I was still alive.

And so was every man in our outfit.

Only two had even been injured.

And they had been hurt not by German bombs,

But by falling flak from our own anti-aircraft guns.

I decided to stop worrying by doing something constructive.

So I built a thick wooden roof over my slit trench to protect myself from flak.

I thought of the vast area over which my unit was spread.

I told myself that the only way I could be killed in that deep,

Narrow slit trench was by a direct hit.

And I figured out that a chance of a direct hit on me was not one in 10,

000.

After a couple of nights of looking at it this way,

I calmed down and even slept through the bomb raids.

The United States Navy used the statistics of the law of averages to buck up the morale of their men.

One ex-sailor told me that when he and his shipmates were assigned to the high octane tankers,

They were worried stiff.

They all believed that if a tanker loaded with high octane gasoline was hit by a torpedo,

It exploded and blew everybody to kingdom come.

But the U.

S.

Navy knew otherwise,

So the Navy issued exact figures showing that one out of 100 tankers hit by torpedoes,

60 of them stayed afloat,

And the 40 that did sink,

Only five sank in less than 10 minutes.

That meant time to get off the ship.

It also meant casualties were exceedingly small.

Did this help morale?

This knowledge of the law of averages wiped out my jitters,

Said Clyde W.

Maas of St.

Paul,

Minnesota,

The man who told this story.

The whole crew felt better.

We knew we had a chance,

And that by the law of averages,

We probably wouldn't be killed.

To break the worry habit before it breaks you,

Here is rule number three.

Let's examine the record.

Let's ask ourselves,

What are the chances,

According to the law of averages,

That this event I am worrying about will ever occur?

Chapter 9.

Cooperate with the inevitable.

When I was a little boy,

I was playing with some of my friends in the attic of an old abandoned log house in northwest Missouri.

As I climbed down out of the attic,

I rested my feet on a windowsill for a moment,

And then jumped.

I had a ring on my left forefinger,

And as I jumped,

The ring caught on the nailhead and tore off my finger.

I screamed.

I was terrified.

I was positive I was going to die.

But after the hand healed,

I never worried about it for one split second.

What would have been the use?

I accepted the inevitable.

Now I often go for a month at a time without even thinking about the fact that I only had three fingers and a thumb on my left hand.

A few years ago I met a man who was running a freight elevator in one of the downtown office buildings in New York.

I noticed that his left hand had been cut off at the wrist.

I asked him if the loss of that had bothered him,

And he said,

Oh no,

I hardly have time to think about that.

I'm not married,

And the only time I ever think about it is when I try to thread a needle.

It is astonishing how quickly we can accept almost any situation if we have to,

And adjust ourselves to it and forget about it.

I often think of an inscription on the ruins of a 15th century cathedral in Amsterdam,

Holland.

This inscription says,

In Flemish,

It is so.

It cannot be otherwise.

As you and I march across the decades of time,

We are going to meet a lot of unpleasant situations that are so.

They cannot be otherwise.

We have our choice.

We can either accept them as inevitable and adjust ourselves to them,

Or we can ruin our lives with rebellion and maybe end up with a nervous breakdown.

Here is a bit of sage advice from one of my favorite philosophers,

William James.

Be willing to have it so,

He said.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

Elizabeth Connolly of Portland,

Oregon had to find that out the hard way.

Here is a letter that she wrote me.

On the very day that America was celebrating the victory of our armed forces in North America,

The letter says,

I received a telegram from the War Department.

My nephew,

The person I loved most,

Was missing in action.

A short time later,

Another telegram arrived saying he was dead.

I was prostrate with grief.

Up to that time,

I had felt that life had been very good to me.

I had a job I loved.

I had helped to raise his nephew.

He represented to me all that was fine and good in young manhood.

I had felt that all the bread I had cast upon the waters was coming back to me as cake.

Then came this telegram.

My whole world collapsed.

I felt there was nothing left to live for.

I neglected my work,

Neglected my friends.

I let everything go.

I was bitter and resentful.

Why did my loving nephew have to be taken?

Why did this good boy with life all before him,

Why did he have to be killed?

I couldn't accept it.

My grief was so overwhelming that I decided to give up my work and go away and hide myself in my tears and my bitterness.

I was clearing out my desk,

Getting ready to quit,

When I came across a letter that I had forgotten.

A letter from this nephew who had been killed.

A letter he had written to me when my mother had died a few years ago.

Of course,

We will all miss her,

The letter said,

And especially you.

But I know you'll carry on.

Your own personal philosophy will make you do that.

I shall never forget the beautiful truths you taught me.

Wherever I am or how far apart we may be,

I shall always remember that you taught me to smile and to take whatever comes like a man.

I read and re-read that letter.

It seemed as if he was there beside me,

Speaking to me.

He seemed to be saying to me,

Why don't you do what you taught me to do?

Carry on,

No matter what happens.

Hide your private sorrows under a smile and carry on.

So I went back to my work.

I stopped being bitter and rebellious.

I kept saying to myself,

It is done.

I can't change it,

But I can and will carry on as he wished me to do.

I threw all my mind and strength into my work.

I wrote letters to soldiers,

To other people's boys.

I joined an adult education class at night,

Seeking out new interests and making new friends.

I can hardly believe the change that has come over me.

I have ceased mourning over the past that has gone forever and I am living each day with joy,

Just as my nephew would have wanted me to do.

I have made peace with life.

I have accepted my fate.

I am now living a fuller and more complete life than I have ever known.

Elizabeth Conley learned what all of us have to learn sooner or later,

Namely that we must accept and cooperate with the inevitable.

It is so.

It cannot be otherwise.

That is not an easy lesson to learn.

Even kings on their thrones have to keep reminding themselves of it.

The late George V had framed words hanging on the wall of his library in Buckingham Palace.

Teach me neither to cry for the moon nor over spilt milk.

The same thought is expressed by Schopenhauer in this way.

A good supply of resignation is of the first importance in providing for the journey of life.

Obviously circumstances alone do not make us happy or unhappy.

It is the way we would react to circumstances that determines our feelings.

Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.

That is where the Kingdom of Hell is too.

We can all endure disaster and tragedy and triumph over them if we have to.

We may not think we can,

But we have surprisingly strong inner resources that will see us through if we only make use of them.

We are stronger than we think.

The late Booth Tarkington always said,

I could take anything that life could force upon me,

Except one thing,

Blindness.

I could never endure that.

Then one day when he was alone in his sixties,

Tarkington glanced down the carpet on the floor.

The colors were blurred.

He couldn't see the pattern.

He went to a specialist.

He learned the tragic truth.

He was losing his sight.

One eye was nearly blind.

The other would follow.

That which he had feared most had come upon him.

And how did Tarkington react to the worst of all disasters?

Did he feel this is it?

This is the end of my life?

No.

To his amazement,

He felt quite gay.

He even called upon his humor.

Floating specks annoyed him.

They would swim across his eyes and cut off his vision.

Yet when the largest of these specks would swim across his light,

He would say,

Hello,

There's grandfather again.

Wonder where he's going on this fine morning.

How could fate ever conquer a spirit like that?

The answer is it couldn't.

When total darkness closed in,

Tarkington said,

I found I could take the loss of my eyesight just as a man can take anything else.

If I lost all five of my senses,

I know I could live on inside my mind.

For it is in the mind we see and in the mind we live,

Whether we know it or not.

In the hope of restoring his eyesight,

Tarkington had to go through more than 12 operations within one year with local anesthetic.

Did he rail against this?

He knew it had to be done.

He knew he couldn't escape it.

So the only way to lessen his suffering was to take it with grace.

He refused a private room at the hospital and went into the ward where he could be with other people who had troubles too.

He tried to cheer them up.

And when he had to submit to repeated operations,

Fully conscious of what was being done to his eyes,

He tried to remember how fortunate he was.

How wonderful,

He said,

How wonderful the science now has the skill to operate on anything so delicate as the human eye.

The average man would have been a nervous wreck if he had to endure more than 12 operations and blindness.

Yet Tarkington said,

I would not exchange this experience for a happier one.

It taught him acceptance.

It taught him that nothing life could bring him was beyond his strength to endure.

It taught him,

As John Milton discovered,

That it was not miserable to be blind.

It is only miserable not to be able to endure blindness.

Margaret Fuller,

The famous New England feminist,

Once offered as her credo,

I accept the universe.

When grouchy old Thomas Carlyle heard that in England,

He snorted,

By God,

She'd better.

Yes,

And by God,

You and I better accept the inevitable too.

If we rail and kick against it and grow bitter,

We won't change the inevitable,

But we will change ourselves.

I know I have tried it.

I once refused to accept an inevitable situation with which I was confronted.

I played the fool and railed against it and rebelled.

I turned my nights into hells of insomnia.

I brought upon myself everything I didn't want.

Finally,

After a year of self-torture,

I had to accept that I knew from the outset I couldn't possibly alter.

I should have cried out years ago with old Walt Whitman,

Oh,

To confront night,

Storms,

Hunger,

Ridicule,

Accident,

Rebuffs,

As the trees and animals do.

I spent 12 years working with cattle,

Yet I never saw a Jersey cow running a temperature because the pasture was burning up from a lack of rain or because of sleep and cold or because her boyfriend was paying too much attention to another heifer.

The animals confront night,

Storms,

And hunger calmly,

So they never have nervous breakdowns or stomach ulcers,

And they never go insane.

Am I advocating that we simply bow down to all the adversities that come our way,

Not by a long shot?

That is mere fatalism.

As long as there is a chance that we can save a situation,

Let's fight.

But when common sense tells us that we are up against something that is so and cannot be otherwise,

Then,

In the name of our sanity,

Let's not look before and after and pine for what is not.

The late Dean Hawkes of Columbia University told me that he had taken a mother-goose rhyme as one of his mottos.

For every ailment under the sun,

There is a remedy or there is none.

If there be one,

Try to find it.

If there be none,

Never mind it.

While writing this book,

I interviewed a number of the leading business executives of America,

And I was impressed by the fact that they cooperated with the inevitable and led lives singularly free from worry.

If they hadn't done that,

They would have cracked under the string.

Here are a few examples of what I mean.

J.

C.

Penney,

Founder of the nationwide chain of penny stores,

Said to me,

I wouldn't worry if I lost every dollar I have because I don't see what is to be gained by worrying.

I do the best job I possibly can and leave the results in the laps of the gods.

Henry Ford told me much the same thing.

When I can't handle events,

He said,

I let them handle themselves.

When I asked K.

T.

Keller,

The president of the Chrysler Corporation,

How he kept from worrying,

He replied,

When I am up against a tough situation,

If I can do nothing about it,

I do it.

If I can't,

I just forget it.

I never worry about the future because I know no man living can possibly figure out what is going to happen in the future.

There are so many possible forces that will affect that future.

Nobody can tell what prompts those forces or understand them,

So why worry about them?

K.

T.

Keller would be embarrassed if you told him he is a philosopher.

He's just a good businessman,

Yet he has stumbled on the same philosophy that Epictetus taught us in Rome 19 centuries ago.

Fear is only one way to happiness.

Epictetus taught the Romans,

And that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.

Sarah Bernhardt,

The Divine Sarah,

Was an illustrious example of a woman who knew how to cooperate with the inevitable.

For half a century,

She had been the reigning queen of the theater on four continents,

The best love actress on earth.

Then,

When she was 71 and broke,

She had lost all her money.

Her physician,

Professor Pazzi of Paris,

Told her he would have to amputate her leg.

While crossing the Atlantic,

She had fallen on deck during a storm and injured her leg severely.

Phlebitis developed.

Her leg shrank.

The pain became so intense that the doctor felt her leg had to be amputated.

He was almost afraid to tell the stormy,

Tempestuous Divine Sarah what had to be done.

He fully expected that the terrible news would set off an explosion of hysteria.

But he was wrong.

Sarah looked at him a moment and then said quietly,

If it has to be,

It has to be.

It was fate.

And,

As she was being wheeled away to the operating room,

Her son stood weeping.

She waved at him with a gay gesture and said cheerfully,

Don't go away.

I'll be right back.

On the way to the operating room,

She recited a scene from one of her plays.

Someone asked her if she was doing this to cheer herself up.

She said no.

To cheer up the doctors and nurses.

It will be a strain on them.

After recovering from the operation,

Sarah Bernhardt went on touring the world and enchanting audiences for another seven years.

When we stop fighting the inevitable,

Says Elsie McCormick in Reader's Digest,

We release energy which enables us to create a richer life.

No one living has enough emotion and vigor to fight the inevitable,

And at the same time,

Enough left over to create a new life.

Choose one or the other.

You can either bend with the inevitable sleet storms of life,

Or you can resist them and break.

I saw that happen on a farm I owned in Missouri.

I planted a score of trees on that farm.

At first they grew with astounding rapidity.

Then a sleet storm encrusted each twig and branch with a heavy coating of ice.

Instead of bowing gracefully to their burden,

These trees proudly resisted and broke and split under the load and had to be destroyed.

They hadn't learned the wisdom of the forests of the north.

I have traveled hundreds of miles through the evergreen forests of Canada,

Yet I have never seen a spruce or a pine broken by sleet or ice.

These evergreen forests know how to bend,

How to bow down their branches,

How to cooperate with the inevitable.

The masters of jiu-jitsu teach their pupils to bend like the willow,

Don't resist like the oak.

Why do you think your automobile tires stand up on the road and take so much punishment?

At first,

The tire manufacturers tried to make a tire that would resist the shocks of the road.

It was soon cut to ribbons.

Then they made a tire that would absorb the shocks on the road.

The tire could take it.

You and I will last longer and enjoy smoother riding if we learn to absorb the shocks and jolts along the rocky road of life.

What will happen to you and me if we resist the shocks of our life instead of absorbing them?

What will happen if we refuse to bend like the willow and insist on resisting like the oak?

The answer is easy.

We will set up a series of inner conflicts.

We will be worried,

Tense,

Strained,

And neurotic.

We will go still further and reject the harsh world of reality and retreat into a dream world of our own making.

We will then be insane.

During the war,

Millions of frightened soldiers had either to accept the inevitable or break under the strain.

To illustrate,

Let's take the case of William H.

Casillas of Glendale,

New York.

Here is a prize-winning talk he gave before one of my classes in New York.

Shortly after I joined the Coast Guard,

I was assigned one of the hottest spots on this side of the Atlantic.

I was made a supervisor of explosives.

Imagine it,

Me,

A cracker salesman becoming a supervisor of explosives.

The very thought of finding yourself standing on top of thousands of tons of TNT is enough to chill the marrow in a cracker salesman's bones.

I was given only two days of instruction,

And what I learned filled me with even more terror.

I never forgot my assignment.

On a dark,

Cold,

Foggy day,

I was given my orders on the open pier of Cavend Point,

Bayon,

New Jersey.

I was assigned to hold number five on my ship.

I had to work down in that hold with five longshoremen.

They had strong backs,

But they knew nothing whatever about explosives,

And they were loading blockbusters,

Each one of them which contained a ton of TNT,

Enough explosive to blow that old ship to kingdom come.

These blockbusters were being lowered by two cable slings.

I kept saying to myself,

Suppose one of these cables slipped or broke.

Oh boy,

Was I scared,

I trembled.

My mouth was dry.

My knees sagged.

My heart pounded,

But I couldn't run away.

That would be desertion.

I would be disgraced.

My parents would be disgraced,

And I might be shot for desertion.

I couldn't run.

I had to stay.

I kept looking at the careless way those longshoremen were handling those blockbusters.

The ship might blow up any minute.

After an hour or more of the spine-chilling terror,

I began to use a little common sense.

I gave myself a good talking to.

I said,

Look here,

So you're blown up,

So what?

You will never know the difference.

It will be an easy way to die.

Much better than dying by cancer.

Don't be a fool.

You can't expect to live to ever.

You've got to do this,

Or you'll be shot,

So you might as well like it.

I talked to myself like that for hours,

And I began to feel at ease.

Finally,

I overcame my worry and fears by forcing myself to accept an inevitable situation.

I'll never forget that lesson.

Every time I am tempted now to worry about something I can't possibly change,

I shrug my shoulders and say,

Forget it.

I find that it works,

Even for a cracker salesman.

Hooray.

Let's give three cheers and one cheer more for the cracker salesman on the pinafore.

Outside of the crucifixion of Jesus,

The most famous death seen in all of history was the death of Socrates.

Ten thousand centuries from now,

Men will still be reading and cherishing Plato's immortal description of it,

One of the most moving and beautiful passages in all of literature.

Certain men of Athens,

Jealous and envious of old,

Barefooted Socrates,

Trumped up charges against him and had tried him and condemned him to death.

When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison-cum-to-drink,

The jailer said,

Try to bear lightly what needs to be done.

Socrates did.

He faced death with a calmness and resignation that touched the hem of divinity.

Try to bear lightly what needs must be.

These words were spoken 399 years before Christ was born,

But this worrying old world needs those words today more than ever before.

Try to bear lightly what needs must be.

I have been reading practically every book and magazine article I could find that dealt with remotely with banishing worry.

Would you like to know what is the best single bit of advice about worry that I have ever discovered in all that reading?

Well,

Here it is,

Summed up in 27 words,

Words that you and I ought to pace on our bathroom mirrors so that each time we wash our faces,

We could also wash away all worry from our minds.

This priceless prayer was written by Dr.

Reinhold Nibber.

God,

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

To break the worry habit before it breaks you,

Rule number four is cooperate with the inevitable.

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

Until next time.

Reviews

I really like your voice and listening to this great meditation ⭐️