Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
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is required of them, and in any organ or function of our being that we desire for the time to exercise.
Perhaps you think, “Well that’s only another way of saying ‘Be careful.’” True. Yet many may not know how to be careful or precise. Do we not see people every-day rushing their legs along the street with the least possible amount of strength, while their minds are planning, wishing, working, hurrying far ahead of them? Yet these people wonder why they forget, wonder why they make so many mistakes, wonder why so many of the small details of their business are irksome: or they go on being so annoyed, and never get sufficiently awakened as to wonder.
Is not this practical philosophy and practical talk? To-morrow, maybe, you are to have a trying interview on a matter vital to your interests, with a sharp, cunning, business-man, who is strong in will as well as knowledge, power, ways, and means to overreach you, to muddle your brains, to trick you, to frighten you. Do you not need every available atom of your force to cope with him?
When we cultivate this power of focusing all our force on any single act, we are cultivating also the power of throwing our whole mind from one subject to another. That means, also, that we can throw our whole mind out of a trouble into what may prove a delight, and forget a grief in a happy work. Grief, loss, disappointment, and discouragement injure and kill many people.
We may say to one so afflicted, “You shouldn’t think of this, that, or the other.” But do we tell them by what means they may turn their minds away from their trouble?
Children of weak minds, and idiots, are deficient in power of grip with their hands. In a certain training-school, such children are made first to grasp a bar above their heads with both hands, and draw themselves upward on their backs along a steeply inclined plane. It requires often many weeks of such exercise before they can do this. The weak mind has no power to throw all its thought or force on the hand, and do one act at a time. This lack may hold good to a great or lesser extent with all grades of weak minds.
Every impatient act, no matter how small, costs us an unprofitable outlay of physical and mental strength,—as when you tug and pull at the hard knot; or when you throw yourself with all your might of fury against the door that’s locked, and try to wrench the knob off because it won’t open readily.
If I turn a grindstone with one arm, I exhaust the force, after a time, in a set of muscles. If I stop turning it with the arm and turn it by a treadle, by foot, I rest the arm-muscles. Then they fill up again with force, and I can, without fatigue, turn the stone with that arm again for a period. A similar law prevails in all manner of mental effort. Say we are-absorbed in some particular subject, plan, scheme, purpose: we dwell on it continually; we cannot stop thinking of it. Do we thereby always make it clearer to ourselves? Do we not thereby often get muddled in thought? Are we not turning that grindstone with our mental muscle (the brain) until it is exhausted, and only the same old set of thoughts relative to the subject occur again and again?
What is needed? Rest for this brain muscle. How? In one way,—by turning the whole force on something else for a time. Did you ever notice that if, when very much fatigued, you can sit down and have an hour’s chat with an agreeable companion, you are rested; and more rested, also, than if you had remained alone, though having no effort of any kind to make? That talk rested and recuperated you. Yet it was an outlay of force. All your thought (your force) was, for the time being, poured into the channel of that conversation. That conversation switched you off, as it were, from one track of thought into another. Our fearfully and wonderfully made organizations are self-recuperative and self-repairers. Give any of its departments rest after being used, and it sets immediately about the work of reconstruction, and that with finer and better material than before. The conversation proved the means of switching us on the other track of thought. Can we do the same occasionally without the help of another? Can we so switch off our whole train of thought from one subject to another? from one act to another? from considering how our house shall be built, to the proper sharpening of a lead pencil, without allowing a thought of the house to come in while sharpening that pencil? Can we sharpen a pencil for sixty consecutive seconds without thinking of something else? If we can, we have made great advance in concentrative power in doing what we have to do with all the might necessary, and reserving whatever of our might is not needed in the act for something else. If we can do this, we are possessed of a share of the greatest power in the universe, not only in making ourselves more and more happy, but also power for doing more and more of whatever we have to do, and doing it better and better. We then rule our minds. No one really rules until he or she rules him or herself.
If in any condition of mental distress you can turn, if but for a second, your whole thought on the sticking of a pin in your dress, you are for that second relieved of your trouble; you have in that second gained an atom of concentrative power.
We are then on the road to absolute rule over our minds and moods. At present, with many, it is the mood that rules the mind. We are as weathercocks,—turned by every passing breeze. We are not sure of a good-humored, cheerful condition of mind for an hour. It may be turned any moment into a state of discouragement, despondency, or irritation, by an event, an obnoxious individual, an unkind word from a friend, a message from an enemy, or even a passing thought. Thousands on thousands would rejoice to be able to forget what is disagreeable. Dwelling on it, be it trouble of debt, trouble of personal animosity, trouble of the affections, trouble of any kind, weakens body and mind, and weakens the person’s power to resist the trouble. Troubled thought is as muddy water. What you need is the power to turn this muddy water off and let clear water in. Troubled thought, mind racked with suspense and anxiety, literally bleeds you to death of your strength. To be able to forget, to turn thought into some more cheerful mood, is to stop this bleeding and get strength again.
To sum up the advantages derived from fixing our whole force on the doing of a single act:—
First, when a nail is driven with all the might of care, exactness, and precision, it is pretty sure to be well driven.
Secondly, in driving it, you have rested some, or many other departments, and are thereby the better prepared to exercise them. You can the better saw a board in two, if you have not been thinking board while driving the nail. Or if, while sewing, you have had your mind on that sewing, you will the better cut your cloth when the time comes to put your mind on your scissors. But to sew and “think scissors,” or to cut cloth and “think sew,” is to put one on the road to blunders and misfits.
Thirdly, focusing all the needed strength for driving the nail, pushing the needle, or handling the scissors, has, if so employed but for ten seconds, been giving you increased training in the power of concentration, and added, also, its mite to your stock of that quality.
Fourthly, it has added to your capacity for getting pleasure out of the doing of any and all things, whether such doing be of mind or body. Putting mind in muscle, brings pleasure from the exercise of muscle. It is the secret of all grace in motion, all skill and dexterity in action. The most graceful dancer is he or she who puts so much thought in the muscles to be used as to forget all things else, and so become entirely absorbed in the act and the expression of sentiment or emotion involved in it.
We can, by such exercise, add continually to our mental power, our executive power, our will power, our mental clearness. We speak of universal love as the consummation of happiness. Must not universal love extend to things and acts as well as persons? and if there is any act tending to our, or others, real good that is irksome to me in the doing, am I not, by so much, out of the domain of universal love?
We are fighting sin: but we can sin, too, when we fight. We can sin against body and mind, even when all their efforts are for the right. We can abuse body and brain, even in the performance of a benevolent act, just as much as in the performance of a wicked one; and the penalty is the same. Perhaps you say, “But I can’t carry out this idea in doing every thing, I have so many things at home to hurry me.” This makes no difference as to results. The laws of your being and mine, have no regard to the number of things we have to hurry us.
But how shall we gain the power of concentrating thought on any and every act, if through years of unconscious damaging habit in the other direction, we seem to have lost it entirely.
Pray