MENTAL INDIGESTION.

Waikato Times, Volume 104, Issue 17586, 15 December 1928, Page 13 (Supplement)

MENTAL INDIGESTION.

COMMON BUT HEARTBREAKING.

(By A. W. Thomson.)

Occasions arise all day long for you to concentrate, since daily life is composed of a multitude of crises. To switch a deal of thought on to each occasion is comparatively easy, but to bring the total avoirdupois of you..' power is really among the trickiest of accomplishments. The cleverest find the matter of avoiding wandering thoughts something of a nightmare. But, apart from that, there is the subtlety between merely concentrating and doing so with the entire reserves of mind, which seems to indicate the bridge between incomplete and complete digestion of mental activity Again, there is the troublesome job of bringing a train of thought to a full stop, like an engine pulling up at a terminus, the instant something else comes along to claim urgent attention. Indeed, to switch like greased lightning from one thing to another as dictated by affairs, and to form perfectly sound and clever conclusions on one and all, is sadder than the Book of Job. Finally, the copy-book moralists drive you crazy by their platitudes.

Cocktails for the Mind.

Indigestion of the mind is as common as that of the body, and the greater difficulty of dealing with it is perfectly heartbreaking. For the troubles of the body you can go to a doctor, get some pills, several Dottles of physic and tonic, listen to a homely lecture on how to live a sound life, plan a course of diet, decide on a physical-exercise prescription, learn lo adopt a jollier mood towards the cares of life, and by a combination of his help and your own reasonably expect a cure. But to And digestives, tonics, cocktails for the mind is a different matter. Curiously enough, such varied advantages as porridge, classical education, minute tinctures of Jewish blood, good banking accounts, and other personal propensities, have all been classed as mental digestives and cocktails. Unfortunately, the problem concerns common mortality, with or without those or other marked .and numerous advantages. tf The matter is really extraordinarily serious. For instance, you find some folk —a very few—with such a prodigious power of digesting the common or garden thoughts that worry us all that they build amazing businesses and fortunes out of a scope in which most commonplace people had failed to detect any money. This quality of visualising commercial wants and meeting them is almost as fascinating an example of first-class mental digestion as can be found. But in ordinary Jii'c and among humbler folk the matter is even more urgent, since the gaugo of efficiency is the measure of power to form uniformly excellent judgments. The thing takes some doing. Education is a statutory medicine. But education is a two-edged thing, since, though it is compounded of mental cocktails and digesthes, strangely enough it occasionally appears to bring about indigestion. Quite a number of wonderful and successful men have had little education in the ordinarily accepted sense. Nor can you say that experience was their bedrock. The only thing you can say is that they possessed the faculty known as nous, or the power of sensing things, better than most other people. When you have broken the precepts of all the copybook moralists that ever lived it really comes back to a question of nous.

Handicapped by Universal Law.

Sup with originality, and use a very short spoon. If you can but differentiate between what justly may bo called theoretical and practical originality,' there you have a jolly old mental digestive indeed. After all is said and done, since no one is quite your replica, since no one else is subject to a precisely similar combination of influences and qualities, you arc logically assumed to have a genius of sorts entirely your own. The trouble is to find it. But if you try hard enough sooner or later it must, like an old dog-fox, puck out from somewhere. And thus life is chockfull of intriguing expectations. Without the hint of preaching, one might mention that certain mental hobbies are to be shunned. A very popular one is to improve on that which is already circumstantially perfect; another is to improve on what is not worth improving. But the matter is complicated by an occasional subtlety in deciding which things really are worthy of improvement. Another vile hobby is to dwell too much on the past; another to live in the future at the expense of the present. Still another is to dwell so much on what you should forget that you have scant time to tackle those things you should remember. And yet another is to dwell on nothing at all. By these vanities some mortals delude themI selves into believing they rise on the ashes of their dead selves to better things. Your head cannot be fuller than overflowing, otherwise all the mental digestion in the world would not help you. You have to remember very soberly that in front of every man pass endless streams of opportunities which, is not seized and digested into practical use, pass spectre-like into the mist. Excellent Mental Digestive. To recline in a roomy chesterfield for at least half an hour every day, and have a real good old think, is an excellent mental digestive, until i science finds a better. But you must look at things with a humorous slant, since humour is one of the finest of mental cocktails. Only do not go to this temple of thought just after lunch, or after dinner. In open career you are handicapped by universal laws and circumstances that, in adjusting themselves, to some extent adjust you too. A daily dissection of your problems and possibilities is therefore almost essential; and, besides, procrastination is a deadly foe, and the moralists were right for once. All men are cursed by thoughts and ideas without form or shape, lying deep in their subconsciousness. Some grow and others do not, like potatoes in a vegetable garden; but all are difficult to evolve practically. There you have the whole thing, to do what others less fortunate dimly feel and cannot express, let alone turn to useful account.