If the best way out of worry is work, don’t sit around moping about that journey, but work. Pack up. You can’t take too much baggage—of the right kind. There are some reasons to suspect that in the new country you’ll find more use than you had here for all that you can get together of learning and wisdom and aspirations and affections: love is giving rather than receiving, you know—even to the point of giving unrecognized. Why not there as well as here? True, your constitution may not be up to that one-sided kind forever, but you may not have to wait so long as that.
And even if you’re lost, baggage and all, it will not have been wasted: for it will have done its service here, and it will not need to be renewed. And you can’t be sure now that you won’t want it. And how ineffably silly it is to worry over the possibility of oblivion! That surely can’t hurt. But if anybody believes that consciousness continues, shut up in a Pozzi-like darkness, deprived of an opportunity to enjoy this beautiful universe or any other, that’s something to worry over. But did anybody ever invent such a Hell as that, or if anybody did, has anybody now any justification for having the blues over it? If you are worried by Scripture, probably you know that of the three uses of “outer darkness” in Matthew, two plainly refer to earthly conditions, and the third may fairly be taken in the same sense.
If you get tired packing, and need more work in view of departure, don’t go back to moping, but get right up and put things in shape for those you’re going to leave behind. But don’t bother them, or do foolish things. One of the best things about that journey is that nearly all the wise preparations for staying here are equally wise for going. So you would be foolish to make very many specific preparations for going. In fact specific preparations for that journey have involved more of the waste and tomfoolery of the world than almost anything else—perhaps more than even war or fashion.
But be ready to go when you’re called.
Meantime circumstances may be so against you that you can’t have a happy life; but probably you can, if you so will, have at least a cheerful one, and those who have had the experience say that it’s pretty hard to tell the difference—that they amount to about the same thing, except that, on the whole, the cheerful life is the more effective; and that, at best, happiness is but a by-product.
All this simple advice may be easier to follow than you think, and if you do follow it, probably you won’t have the blues.
THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE OF KICKING
Now, at this present moment, and for the next two months, twenty million American youth,—turning from syndicalism, the new morality, forgotten virtues, capitalism, psychical research, sociology, trust-busting, fly-swatting, preventive medicine, the evils of alcohol and tobacco, and other of the million burning questions of the day,—are and will be chiefly occupied with the important historical problem as to whether Mr. Charles Brickley, captain of and kicker-in-extraordinary to the Harvard football team, is a mightier man than the ancient heroes of the kicking game,—Moffatt, Bull, Brooke, Trafford, O’Dea, Poe, Sharpe, Eckershall,—and with this discussion they will couple the practical ambition and personal hope of joining the great galaxy.