The Daily Cost of Our Higher Possibilities

We all intend when young to be all that befits a man, before the destroyer cuts us down. We wish and expect to enjoy poetry always, to grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music, to keep in touch with spiritual and religious ideas, and even not to let the greater philosophic thoughts of our time develop quite beyond our view. We mean all this in youth, I say; and yet in how many middle-aged men and women is such an honest and sanguine expectation fulfilled? Surely, in comparatively few; and the laws of habit show us why. Some interest in each of these things arises in everybody at the proper age. But, if not persistently fed with the appropriate matter, instead of growing into a powerful and necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by the rival interests to which the daily food is given. We make ourselves into Darwins in this negative respect by persistently ignoring the essential practical conditions of our case. We say abstractly: “I mean to enjoy poetry, and to absorb a lot of it, of course. I fully intend to keep up my love of music, to read the books that will give new turns to the thought of my time, to keep my higher spiritual side alive, etc.” But we do not attack these things concretely, and we do not begin today. We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone, until those smiling possibilities are dead. Yet ten minutes a day of poetry, of spiritual reading or meditation, and an hour or two a week at music, pictures, or philosophy, provided that we began now and allowed no remission, would infallibly give us in due time the fullness of all we desire. By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities. This is a point about which you teachers might well give a little timely information to your older and more aspiring pupils.

Depending on whether a function receives daily exercise or not, the man becomes a different kind of being in later life. We have lately had a number of accomplished Hindu visitors at Cambridge, who talked freely of life and philosophy. More than one of them has confided to me that the sight of our faces, all contracted as they are with the habitual American over-intensity and anxiety of expression, made on him a very painful impression. So did our ungraceful and distorted attitudes when sitting. “I do not see,” said one, “how it is possible for you to live as you do, without a single minute in your day deliberately given to tranquility and meditation. It is an invariable part of our Hindu life to retire for at least half an hour daily into silence, to relax our muscles, to govern our breathing, and to meditate on eternal things. Every Hindu child is trained to this from a very early age.” The good fruits of such a discipline were obvious in the physical repose and lack of tension, and the wonderful smoothness and calmness of facial expression, and imperturbability of manner of these people of the East. I felt that my countrymen were depriving themselves of an essential grace of character. How many American children ever hear it said by parent or teacher that they should moderate their piercing voices, that they should relax their unused muscles, and that, as far as possible, when sitting, they should sit quite still? Not one in a thousand, not one in five thousand! Yet, from its reflex influence on the inner mental states, this ceaseless over-tension, over-motion, and over-expression are working on us grievous national harm.