The hardest task for the worrier at home is to get away from home. With advancing years the temptation grows upon us to spend our evenings by the fireside, to make no new friends and seek no new enjoyments. But this unbroken habit is neither the best preparation for a happy old age, nor the best method of counteracting present worry. Nor should one stop to decide whether the special entertainment in question will be worthwhile—he must depend rather on the realization that if he accepts most opportunities he will be, on the whole, the gainer.
The man whose occupation keeps him in-doors all day should make special effort to pass some time in the open air, if possible walking or driving to and from his place of business, and taking at least a stroll in the evening.
As more than one writer has suggested, the best resource is the fad. The fad will prove an inestimable boon after withdrawing from active work, but it should be commenced long before one discontinues business, else the chances are that he will never take it up, but will fret away his time like the average man who retires from an occupation which has engrossed his attention.
The fad should not be pursued too strenuously, or its charm is lost. A lady once told me that she had given up studying flowers because she found she could not master botany in the time at her disposal. Another sees no use in taking up history unless he can become an authority on some epoch. Another declines to study because he can never overtake the college graduate. But one of the best informed men of my acquaintance had no college education. One of his fads was history, with which he was far more familiar than any but the exceptional college man, outside the teachers of that branch of learning.
The usefulness of the fad does not depend upon the perfection attained in its pursuit, but upon the pleasure in its pursuit, and upon the diversion of the mind from its accustomed channels. The more completely one learns to concentrate his thoughts on an avocation, the more enthusiasm and effectiveness he can bring to bear on his vocation in its turn. A fad that occupies the hands, such as carpentering, turning, or photography, is peculiarly useful if one's taste runs in that direction.
One handicap in cultivating the fad is the lack of interest on the part of our associates, but if we become genuinely interested in any fad that is at all worth while, we shall inevitably add new acquaintances likely to prove at least as interesting as those of our present friends, who have no thoughts outside their daily round of toil. The more fads one cultivates, so long as he avoids the obsession to obtrude them at all times and places, the more interesting he will, in his turn, become to others.
The over-solicitude that defeats its own end, in the case of a parent, has been admirably portrayed by Arthur Benson in "Beside Still Waters,"—"there was nothing in the world that he more desired than the company and the sympathy of his children; but he had, beside this, an intense and tremulous sense of his responsibility toward them. He attached an undue importance to small indications of character, and thus the children were seldom at ease with their father, because he rebuked them constantly, and found frequent fault, doing almost violence to his tenderness, not from any pleasure in censoriousness, but from a terror, that was almost morbid, of the consequences of the unchecked development of minute tendencies."
Something must be left to natural growth, and to fortune, even in such important matters as the rearing of children.