SEVENTEEN TO TWENTY-FOUR

Greymouth Evening Star, 26 July 1930, Page 11

SEVENTEEN TO TWENTY-FOUR

“TAKING OVER” PERSONALITY.

The word “crisis” originally meant a.judgment, a testing. In this sense we .all experience crises at every age of life. A change of jobs, a new responsibility, marriage, maybe a chance conversation bringing some new flash of enlightenment, and our old assurance of routine and habit break up. We are being tested all over again, and what is in doubt is not so much what will happen to us, as what will happen inside us. The question is, what we are worth in the new range of experience we must go through (writes Kenneth Henderson in the “Sydney Morning Herald”). The age between seventeen and twenty-four is almost of necessity the most critical of crises—a crisis which is a series of them. During these years we leave school, apprenticeship, the university, home, and pass into occupations of our own. The coming responsibility naturally stirs a confusion of fear and elation, faith and doubt, loyalties and self-assertion—all valuable if we can manage them properly. Particularly then we feel keenly self-conscious and uncertain, partly because we cannot know what stuff of reality there is in this rich confusion of ourselves until our own work analyses our personalities, partly because we do know that our seniors and associates are watching us eagerly, from a working world which is perpetually short of ability, sense, and character, for symptoms of these things in us. Anyone who remembers what “seventeen to twenty-four” feels like is naturally disposed to hail its adventurers with help from beyond. But when he tries, to do this, the words that come seem platitudes. Now platitudes are like the labels on packets of sandwiches, easily read from the outside, but one has to bite into the sandwiches to find what the labels mean. The most experimental person finds himself continually discovering, for the first time, the stuff that platitudes are made of.

First then “Be not anxious.” Troubles seem so much solider, their edges seem so much sharper when we are young. They loom solid and threatening, rigjit across the path. Later we find that what looked like a rock precipice was really a dark, cloud, cold and confusing, but not so thick that we could not see the next step. It is the natural property of life to bring us through and out on the other side. You may get hurt going through, but life has .amazing recuperative powers which youth cannot realise. There is a rhythm by which peace- follows pain, calm succeeds anxiety, refreshment weariness. It is well to remember, in going through the valley of the dark shadow, that there is always the other side. And the road through leads somewhere worth going if you walk purposefully. Nothing can happen to you so black and bitter but that you, by bearing yourself well in the midst of it, carrying on with courage, steadiness, and charity, without bitterness or panic, may some day look back on the dark time with some thankfulness and satisfaction. The harder the trial, the more there is to make of it —stronger spiritual muscle, enlarged sympathies, clearer judgment, surer sense of proportion and value, more deeply seated faith. Unppoularity, taken in the right spirit, may help you to walk alone when need be—a rare and precious power. Sickness borne with valour may bring, you a life reserve of fortitude, bereavement even a sense of kinship with the eternal world, and a memory maybe that serves as a standard for the rest of your days. All this is easy to write, but costly to win.

But what of mistakes, hardest of all to bear in youth. Each seems sq final, so damaging. Perhaps there are no such things as irrevocable mistakes while life lasts, as long as your inner vitality is not damaged. A wrong choice of profession? Cut your losses, keep your earnings of widened experience, it will not be wasted. Blunders of judgment, morals, and taste may hurt, may lose a lot of time, may need a lot of living down, but the patient effort of recovery will give you a quality you could scarcely have won in another way. And it is being watched. A sense of security is offering itself to you in that turmoil of experiment, “seventeen to twenty-four.” Beware of a low estimate of your powers. I believe that this is commoner in youth than the opposite mistake, and it is the cause of most selfassertiveness. At any rate, it is well to remember"that you get forward, not by shirking responsibility on the one hand, or trying to “jump” the natural stages of your proving on the other; but by applying all you have and are to the enlargement of your present opportunities. There is a blending of real suffering with keen joy in doing anything as well as you can. You work with your nerves, giving them as much as they can stand, and find that they can stand a bit more. There is hardly a job so small that it cannot try you out to the full if you put into it your whole self to the highest power. This is the parable of the Talents. You cannot develop your possibilities save by adventuring with them, making everything that you undertake an adventure requiring the greatest possible enlargement of your whole mind and soul. Think w r ell of yourself therefore, but don’t use that estimate as a refuge to dream an, a place of escape from the judgment of your fellows. Use it as fuel to generate power for definite tasks. And where you discover natural limitations, discipline may partly, make them good; but turn, if you can, from the work for which you have less than ordinary capacity to that which calls for your natural abilities. Don’t be in a hurry to give yourself up for the want of certain qualities. Your signal gift's cannot be fully used unless they get some help from their opposites. The imaginative writer,‘for example, does better if lie disciplines himself inteo steady methodical work and revision, though it. is against the grain. VISION AND EXPERIENCE. / To understand anything from the ' inside —a pudding, a profession, or a religion—it is necessary to make a venture of faith. To learn to drive a car or practise a trade, you must at first and always to some extent trust the best experience of those who have worked before you. Humility is the inevitable preliminary to adventure, for you will not climb out of the enclosure of your own imaginings, you will not find the beginning of the way of personal discovery unless you allow it to be revealed to you. Brunning, the German theologian, has re-

cently remarked that people to-day object to the idea of revelation because it makes them small. The same difficulty applies to most kinds of lifelong learning—it makes one feel small. Yet in all personal achievement of every kind, adventure and humility must blend. You must use your judgment as. to whom to trust, but you cannot enter into life without trusting. Beware then of the cyhic, the man who seems to speak with an inside knowledge of life, .but whose refusal to see good in anyone or anything has shut him out, whatever his abilities, from noble and generous living. Truly life’s voyaging would be an affair of gallant and high-hearted happiness for many more young pepole if, as the gospel puts it, a millstone could be hanged round the necks of these discouragers of youth, and they could be cast into the sea. Trust wisely, then, and if you would understand life in its deepest and finest possibilities, make it youi business to understand the life ami teaching of Jesus of Nazpreth with the best of to-day that you can get. Follow down those tremendous paradoxes into the depths of your own bein”- They are, none of them, obvious to°a superficial reading. Though the words are simple, they call for a close firm questioning of thought, and as you try to live with a meaning of your own, the truth of them, one by one, will break upon you with a shock of surprise. Be not afraid of finding God in high and splendid loyalties, wherein He is often; anonymous. We are apt to look at these loyalties, and the religious faith which underlies them, with something like fear. We dread believing. Looked at from outside, the demands these loyalties make seem terrifying and impossible; but remember that a great allegiance creates and releases in you its own rising tide of vitality, which makes the yoke easier and the burden lighter. Vitality is a rhythmic thing. It ebbs and flows. Tasks which seem made for you to-day will look impossible to-morrow. To get them done, you must learn to work at them steadily through the cold spells. The power will come back, and as you grow in confidence the tide will rise, higher, and not ebb so far. Trust to that rising rhythm. It is a natural process. The standard, the purpose takes hold of you, and becomes part of you. Moments of enthusiasm and insight will come and fade again, but they will never quite go. The high moments will pervade th© ordinary ones. You will find yourself often wanting, with almost every fibre of your being, to desert, to do semething slack or base, but not quite able to do it. The deeper personality which belongs to your loyalty holds. And as time goes on, the honest thinking, the wide goodwill, the humble witness, the brave building which your loyalty asks, will become natural by reason of the vitality which it builds up in you. Thus the service of God and man becomes by degrees nearer to perfect freedom.