The Worry of the Squirrel Cage : Part 4

Quit Your Worrying!
by George Wharton James

(Page 15 of 23)

It was to be a large dinner - large, that is, for Endbury - of twenty covers, and Lydia had never prepared a table for so many guests. The number of objects necessary for the conventional setting of a dinner table appalled her. She was so tired, and her attention was so fixed on the complicated processes going on uncertainly in the kitchen, that her brain reeled over the vast quantity of knives and forks and plates and glasses needed to convey food to twenty mouths on a festal occasion. They persistently eluded her attempts to marshal them into order. She discovered that she had put forks for the soup - that in some inexplicable way at the plate destined for an important guest there was a large kitchen spoon of iron, a wild sort of whimsical humor rose in her from the ferment of utter fatigue and anxiety. When Paul came in, looking very grave, she told him with a wavering laugh, 'If I tried as hard for ten minutes to go to Heaven as I've tried all day to have this dinner right, I'd certainly have a front seat in the angel choir. If anybody here to-night is not satisfied, it'll be because he's harder to please than St. Peter himself.'

During the evening:

Lydia seemed to herself to be in an endless bad dream. The exhausting efforts of the day had reduced her to a sort of coma of fatigue through which she felt but dully the successive stabs of the ill-served unsuccessful dinner. At times, the table, the guests, the room itself, wavered before her, and she clutched at her chair to keep her balance. She did not know that she was laughing and talking gaily and eating nothing. She was only conscious of an intense longing for the end of things, and darkness and quiet.

When it was all over and her husband was compelled to recognize that it had been a failure, his mental attitude is thus expressed:

He had determined to preserve at all costs the appearance of the indulgent, non-critical, over-patient husband that he intensely felt himself to be. No force, he thought grimly, shutting his jaws hard, should drag from him a word of his real sentiments. Fanned by the wind of this virtuous resolution, his sentiments grew hotter and hotter as he walked about, locking doors and windows, and reviewing bitterly the events of the evening. If he was to restrain himself from saying, he would at least allow himself the privilege of feeling all that was possible to a man deeply injured.

And that night Lydia felt for the "first time the quickening to life of her child. And during all that day, until then, she had forgotten that she was to know motherhood." Can words more forcefully depict the worry of the squirrel-cage than this - that an unnecessary dinner, given in unnecessary style, at unnecessary expense, to visitors to whom it was unnecessary should have driven from her thought, and doubtless seriously injured, the new life that she was so soon to give to the world?

Oh, men and women of divine descent and divine heritage, quit your squirrel-cage stage of existence. Is life to be one mere whirling around of the cage of useless toil or pleasure, of mere imagining that you are doing something? Work with an object. Know your object, that it is worthy the highest endeavor of a human being, and then pursue it with a divine enthusiasm that no obstacle can daunt, an ardor that no weariness can quench. Then it is you will begin to live. There is no life in worry. Worry is a waste of life. If you are a worrier, that is a proof you (in so far as you worry) do not appreciate the value of your own life, for a worthy object, a divine enthusiasm, a noble ardor are in themselves the best possible preventives against worry. They dignify life above worry. Worry is undignified, petty, paltry. Where you know you have something to do worth doing, you are conscious of the Divine Benediction, and who can worry when the smile of God rests upon him? This is a truism almost to triteness, and yet how few fully realize it. It is the unworthy potterers with life, the dabblers in life-stuff, those who blind themselves to their high estate, those who are unsure of their footing who worry. The true aristocrat is never worried about his position; the orator convinced of the truth of his message worries not as to how it will be received; the machinist sure of his plans hesitates not in the construction of his machinery; the architect assured of his accuracy pushes on his builders without hesitancy or question, fear, or alarm; the engineer knowing his engine and his destination has no heart quiver as he handles the lever. It is the doubter, the unsure, the aimless, the dabbler, the frivolous, the dilettante, the uncertain that worry. How nobly Browning set this forth in his Epilogue:

What had I on earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel -
Being - Who?
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
No, at noonday in the bustle of man's worktime
Greet the unseen with a cheer!
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
'Strive and thrive!' cry 'Speed, - fight on, fare ever
There as here!'

And this is not "mere poetry." Or rather it is because it is "mere poetry" that it is real life. Browning had nearly seventy years of it. He knew. Where there are those to whom "God has whispered in the ear," there is no uncertainty, no worry. The musician who knows his instrument, knows his music, knows his key, and knows his time to play never hesitates, never falters, never worries. With tone clear, pure, strong, and certain, he sends forth his melodies or harmonies into the air. Cannot you, in your daily life, be a true and sure musician? Cannot you be certain - absolutely, definitely certain - of your right to play the tune of life in the way you have it marked out before you, and then go ahead and play! Play, in God's name, as God's and man's music-maker.

About the Author

George Wharton James (1858 - 1923) was a prolific popular lecturer and journalist, writing more than 40 books and many articles and pamphlets on California and the American Southwest. James was born in Lincolnshire, England. He was ordained as a Methodist minister and came to the United States in 1881, serving in parishes in Nevada and southern California.