Quit Your Worrying!

Produced by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
Living the Radiant Life, What the White Race may learn from the Indian, The story of Scraggles, California, Romantic and Beautiful, Our American Wonderlands, etc. etc.
1916
who are standing on the banks of worry before the ocean of God's love I cry aloud
O heart of mine, we shouldn't worry so, What we have missed of calm we couldn't have, you know!
What we've met of stormy pain, And of sorrow's driving rain, We can better meet again, If it blow.
We have erred in that dark hour, we have known, When the tear fell with the shower, all alone.
Were not shine and shower blent As the gracious Master meant? Let us temper our content With His own.
For we know not every morrow Can be sad; So forgetting all the sorrow We have had, Let us fold away our fears, And put by our foolish tears, And through all the coming years, Just be glad.
Between twenty and thirty years ago, I became involved in a series of occurrences and conditions of so painful and distressing a character that for over six months I was unable to sleep more than one or two hours out of the twenty-four. In common parlance I was worrying myself to death, when, mercifully, a total collapse of mind and body came. My physicians used the polite euphemism of cerebral congestion to describe my state which, in reality, was one of temporary insanity, and it seemed almost hopeless that I should ever recover my health and poise. For several months I hovered between life and death, and my brain between reason and unreason.
In due time, however, both health and mental poise came back in reasonable measure, and I asked myself what would be the result if I returned to the condition of worry that culminated in the disaster. This question and my endeavors at its solution led to the gaining of a degree of philosophy which materially changed my attitude toward life. Though some of the chief causes of my past worry were removed there were still enough adverse and untoward circumstances surrounding me to give me cause for worry, if I allowed myself to yield to it, so I concluded that my mind must positively and absolutely be prohibited from dwelling upon those things that seemed justification for worry. And I determined to set before me the ideal of a life without worry.