How to Face Life

by Stephen S. Wise

And the freedom of youth means freedom to be one’s self, to be a law unto one’s self, not to be one’s self in lawlessness. Choose ye this day whom ye will serve,—remembering that the responsibility of decision rests with you and that, in the despite of all the lives that have been lived and all the maps that have been drawn and all the plans that have been sketched and all the precedents that have been set, you must live your own life, and, if it be not your own life, it is not life at all. Cherish the counsels of loved ones but remember that neither mother nor father, uncle nor cousin nor any kinsman or kinswoman whosoever can choose whom you are to serve. You cannot serve God unless yours be the choice.

Young men and women require to be warned against a thousand and one influences ever lurking near at hand to deter youth from the hazard of the spirit’s pioneering. Despise the counsels of the over-wise and over-mature, the sum of whose low wisdom is that a man can make no graver mistake in life than to wander from the paths which all men else have pursued. The fear of seeming unusual obsesses the soul of too many of us. Not a few men and women would rather be wrong than seem different. Difference, variance, distinctiveness are not ends in themselves, but may become and ofttimes are the means that must be used by him who is not fearful of moral distinction.

Outward differentiation is nothing, but inward distinction is everything,—is the counsel I ever urge upon my fellow-Jews. We are not to seem different for the sake of seeming, but we are to dare to seem to be different in order to be distinguished, in order to achieve spiritual outstandingness. When nice and refined and timid people say to you, “Remember to be like everybody else, don’t attempt anything new, don’t run the risk of seeming peculiar, don’t dream of venturing upon novel courses whether in things great or small,” remember that there is a possible invasion of the soul’s integrity that no man need endure. To the counsels of the timorous fling back the command to the brave: “Always do what you are afraid to do.”

When men seek to affright you by their counsels of prudence, remind them of the rule of one of the knightliest of Americans, the founder of Hampton Institute, who laid upon one youth’s soul the burden: “doing what can’t be done is the glory of living.” And when men seek to degrade you to the level of their own base timidity, bid them to remember the courage and nobleness that were in the act of Higginson in leading a negro regiment touching which he said: “We all fought, for instance, with ropes around our necks, the Confederate authorities having denied to officers of colored regiments the usual privileges if taken prisoners and having required them to be treated as felons.”

Pioneering, moreover, presupposes unrest, discontent, just as it should. I am not fearful for the youth whose soul is in a state of unrest, the youth who has soaring ideals and knows not whether life is even worth living. If that be his problem it is enough for him to know, paraphrasing the word of the Jewish fathers, that whether or not life is worth living we must live as if it were and we must make life fuller of worth. Are you dissatisfied, are you discontented, so much the better for you. Hearing from the mother of James Russell Lowell of his general discontent with the conditions of society, Emerson wrote to her, “I hope he will never get over it.” Better the nobly discontented than the ignobly content. Did not John Stuart Mill say that pigs are always satisfied and men are always dissatisfied. But let your discontent and dissatisfaction be not with the world but with yourself, knowing that if it be noble it shall lift you up.

Grave consequences attend the too definite mapping out of life’s programme. Men’s passion for and faith in the profession of soldiering rest upon youth’s yearning for adventure. And if, perchance, to-day great multitudes of men are yearning to take up arms, it is not because they would destroy an enemy, but because they would obliterate the emptiness of their own lives, because they are in revolt against the absence in normal life to-day of the pioneering opportunity. It is this lack of stimulus or impulse in the direction of pioneering which makes for poor, mean, low substitutes in the realm of adventure. The low gang takes the place of high comradeship, the debasing fling becomes a substitute for ennobling adventure. The passion for glamour and glare, as disclosed in the craze for the motion picture, is only another expression of the thwarted sense of adventure which the soul of youth dare not be denied.

Seeing that the gang spirit is nothing more than a crude, imperfect, at worst sinful, expression of youth’s passion for togetherness, what needs to be done is to offer youth an opportunity for the expression of the deep yearning for fraternalism. Do young men imagine that they must have their fling? Is it not because life as lived is often so flat and stale and unprofitable that the fling of the body is substituted for the adventure of the spirit, that, failing to grasp hold of the eternal realities and verities, men set out to magnify the passing and perishable? When everything big is shut out of life it is not to be wondered at that life becomes full of meanness and littleness and unworthiness.

Give yourself to something great, enroll under the banner of a high cause, choose as your own some standard of self-sacrifice, attach yourself to a movement that makes not for your own gain but for the welfare of men, and you will have come upon a richly satisfying as well as engrossing adventure. Either your spirit will greatly and bravely, nobly and self-forgettingly adventure, or you will be in danger of yielding to the dominance of your appetites, you will be in peril of being overcome by your masterful passions. Dare to give every power of your life to the furtherance of a mighty cause. Let your spirit come under the dominance of a high and exalting enthusiasm. So will you gain the mastery over yourself, not as a matter of prudence, not as a matter of caution, not as a matter of timidity, not as a matter of duty.

Let something so high and noble come into your life that it shall be expulsive of everything low and mean. The men one honors most, the men one has reason to cherish most highly, are those into whose lives something so lofty and commanding has come as to have left no room for the mean and petty. Having given themselves to the furtherance of a high and exalted ideal, life leaves no place for the mean. The selfish and the unworthy retreats with the precipitancy of the coward before the imperiousness of the noble impulse, the divine aim. And to their honor be it said, young men and women will rise to the highest level when it invites or challenges. There is in the heart of youth a limitless capacity for ardent devotion to causes of nobleness if but it be evoked and guided. And youth, too, understands how noble the venturesome deed may be even when utterly futile, how sublime in essence even when broken and foredoomed.

But men cannot finely pioneer nor nobly adventure until after they have learned certain lessons in life. Men must learn to be self-reveringly independent, which implies not the aloofness of solitude but the aloneness when necessary of moral and spiritual self-reliance. Man must learn to live his own life. There is no greater danger in our time than that a man shall submit to the tyranny of the crowd. A man need not be remote from nor yet alien to the world and yet he may live his own life and live within himself. We suffer ourselves to come under the domination of mob-feeling and mob-thinking, such as it is, because we have not learned the art of shutting ourselves away at times from the world. We seem never to dare to be alone because, though we know it not, we would fain avoid facing life’s problems. We must understand, too, that, if the problems of our own life are to be met and solved, these things cannot be done vicariously. Not parents nor teachers nor ministers can solve those pressing problems of our inner life with which a man can cope effectively only amid the solitude of his inmost life. Until you have learned the art of separating yourself for some time in every day from the multitude, you will not learn how to think out and think through life’s problems. You will not even know that there are problems to be resolved.