It is not wise to specialize too much in the pursuit of the fad. Suppose the busy man, having conceded the value of some out-of-door study, decides that he will learn the lumber industry, but take no interest in the shade trees. He will not materially broaden his interests in this way. He will rather add to his burdens another business. If he applies to this new business the same conscientious methods which are wearing him out in his present one, the value of the fad is gone, the new study has done him more harm than good, and when on his vacation, unless there is a sawmill in the neighborhood, he finds himself stranded with only worry for company. Similarly, if the study of history is taken up in the way a fad should be taken up, anything in the way of a book will now interest the worrier, for hardly a book worth reading fails to contain either a bit of travel, geography, biography, law, or something on manners and customs.
Permanent freedom from worry involves a change in one's whole view of life and method of thought. But the means by which introspection may be temporarily alleviated are by no means to be despised. Among these comes the pursuit of the golf-ball. Many a business and professional man who thinks he has no time for golf can easily escape for an hour's play at the end of the day, twice a week, and in the long run it will prove to be time well expended. In point of fact, most are hindered rather by the notion that it is not worth while to visit the links unless one can play eighteen holes, or that it is not worth while to take up the game at all unless one can excel. But the exercise is the same, and the air equally bracing whether we win or lose; the shower-bath will refresh us just the same whether we have played nine holes or twenty-seven.
The automobile ride, the drive, and, best of all, the ride on horseback, will often serve to banish the vapors. Many neglect these methods, not from lack of time or money, but from indisposition.
A busy professional man recently assured me that he had renewed his youth by going three times a week to the gymnasium and joining the "old man's class." Here is an opportunity open to practically everyone; it is a desirable practice if continued. The drawback is the lack of incentive when the novelty has passed. Such incentive is furnished by the fad, in the satisfaction of gaining new knowledge and broadening the thought-associations.
XVIII. HOME TREATMENT
Submit to what is unavoidable, banish the impossible from the mind, and look around for some new object of interest in life.
Goethe.
In the treatment of faulty mental habits the chief reliance is the training of the mind; physical measures are merely supplementary. This fact has always been recognized in a general way. The need of such training was emphasized by Epictetus thus: