THE ART OF WORRYING

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3823, 19 October 1936, Page 7

THE ART OF WORRYING

FERTILE SOURCE OF DISEASE. “Somebody ought to write a book on “The High Art of Worrying Well.” Very seldom do we hear or read a sensible word on the subject of worry,” writes Dr F. W'. Boreham, in the “Sunday at Home.” “Wle are like men who find themselves at sea with neither chart nor compass. At the one extreme we have pietists and idealists who declare absurdly enough, that all worry is wicked. And, at the other extreme, we have men, good men, sensible men, lovable men—who worry themselves into premature graves,” adds Dr Boreham. “Worry is a very good thing in its way. Obviously, we were made to worry; but we were made to worry wisely. We were made to take life seriously and to feel the gravity of things. The man who never worries about his business will never have a business worth worrying about. “There come times when it becomes imperative that a doctor should worry about his patient, that a barrister should worry about his case, that a farmer should worry about his cattle and his crops, and that every man should worry about the task that has been assigned him. It is only through mental stress—the stress that follows upon failure and discontent that improvements are devised and remedies conceived. “The trouble is that in this, as in so many other things, we go to ridiculous excess. It is our duty to worry about one or two things—big things; the things that we were sent into the world to worry about. Instead of being- content to worry on this moderate and conservative scale, we foolishly proceed to worry about everything! “Having once acquired the art of worrying, we allow the art to degenerate into a habit;, we lose all sense of proportion, and we quickly pay the penalty. By scattering our nervous energy broadcast we become bankrupt of vitality. Wei reduce our mental and physical stock-in-trade to ‘a condition of absolute exhaution. And exhaution, as Sir James Paget used to say, is the fertile source of all disease.

“Wjorrying must be rendered artistic. It is the duty of the novelist and the dramatist to introduce a noble array of characters; but they must be careful to make one or two stand out from all the rest. By the very constitution of our minds, we are incapable of taking an equal interest in the multitude of heroes. The artist may introduce into his painting a thousand separate objects; but one or two ihust stand conspicuously forth upon the canvas.

“The speaker must emphasise one or two words only in each sentence; to emphasise all is to emphasise none. We are born worriers; and our education is not complete until it has taught us to use, artistically and scientifically, this fundamental propensity. But a wise man will make it his business to discover the things that are really worth worrying about; and, having made his discovery, will set himself with all his heart to worry about those things—and about nothing in all the world beside.”