32 داستان واقعی - بخش 02

Part Ten

How I Conquered Worry

32 True Stories

When the Sheriff Came in My Front Door by Homer Croy

Novelist, 150 Pinehurst Avenue, New York, New York.

The bitterest moment of my life occurred one day in 1933 when the sheriff came in the front door and I went out the back. I had lost my home at 10 Standish Road, Forest Hills, Long Island, where my children were born and where I and my family had lived for eighteen years. I had never dreamed that this could happen to me. Twelve years before, I thought I was sitting on top of the world. I had sold the motion picture rights to my novel West of the Water Tower for a top Hollywood price. I lived abroad with my family for two years. We summered in Switzerland and wintered on the French Riviera, just like the idle rich.

I spent six months in Paris and wrote a novel entitled They Had to See Paris. Will Rogers appeared in the screen version. It was his first talking picture. I had tempting offers to remain in Hollywood and write several of Will Rogers’ pictures. But I didn’t. I returned to New York. And my troubles began!

It slowly dawned on me that I had great dormant abilities that I had never developed. I began to fancy myself a shrewd business man. Somebody told me that John Jacob Astor had made millions investing in vacant land in New York. Who was Astor? Just an immigrant peddler with an accent. If he could do it, why couldn’t I? I was going to be rich! I began to read the yachting magazines.

I had the courage of ignorance. I didn’t know any more about buying and selling real estate than an Eskimo knows about oil furnaces. How was I to get the money to launch myself on my spectacular financial career? That was simple. I mortgaged my home, and bought some of the finest building lots in Forest Hills. I was going to hold this land until it reached a fabulous price, then sell it and live in luxury, I who had never sold a piece of real estate as big as a doll’s handkerchief. I pitied the plodders who slaved in offices for a mere salary. I told myself that God had not seen fit to touch every man with the divine fire of financial genius.

Suddenly, the great depression swept down upon me like a Kansas cyclone and shook me as a tornado would shake a hen coop.

I had to pour $220 a month into that monster, mouthed piece of Good Earth. Oh, how fast those months came! In addition, I had to keep up the payments on our now, mortgaged house and find enough food. I was worried. I tried to write humor for the magazines. My attempts at humor sounded like the lamentations of Jeremiah! I was unable to sell anything. The novel I wrote failed. I ran out of money. I had nothing on which I could borrow money except my typewriter and the gold fillings in my teeth. The milk company stopped delivering milk. The gas company turned off the gas. We had to buy one of those little outdoor camp stoves you see advertised; it had a cylinder of gasoline; you pump it up by hand and it shoots out a flame with a hissing like an angry goose.

We ran out of coal; the company sued us. Our only heat was the fireplace. I would go out at night and pick up boards and left, overs from the new homes that the rich people were building. I who had started out to be one of these rich people.

I was so worried I couldn’t sleep. I often got up in the middle of the night and walked for hours to exhaust myself so I could fall asleep.

I lost not only the vacant land I had bought, but all my heart’s blood that I had poured into it.

The bank closed the mortgage on my home and put me and my family out on the street.

In some way, we managed to get hold of a few dollars and rent a small apartment. We moved in the last day of 1933. I sat down on a packing case and looked around. An old saying of my mother’s came back: “Don’t cry over spilt milk.”

But this wasn’t milk. This was my heart’s blood!

After I had sat there a while I said to myself: “Well, I’ve hit bottom and I’ve stood it. There’s no place to go now but up.”

I began to think of the fine things that the mortgage had not taken from me. I still had my health and my friends. I would start again. I would not grieve about the past. I would repeat to myself every day the words I had often heard my mother say about spilt milk.

I put into my work the energy that I had been putting into worrying. Little by little, my situation began to improve. I am almost thankful now that I had to go through all that misery; it gave me strength, fortitude, and confidence. I know now what it means to hit bottom. I know it doesn’t kill you. I know we can stand more than we think we can. When little worries and anxieties and uncertainties try to disturb me now, I banish them by reminding myself of the time I sat on the packing case and said: “I’ve hit bottom and I’ve stood it. There is no place to go now but up.”

What’s the principle here? Don’t try to saw sawdust. Accept the inevitable! If you can’t go lower, you can try going up. Part Ten

How I Conquered Worry

32 True Stories

The Toughest Opponent I

Ever Fought Was Worry

by Jack Dempsey

During my career in the ring, I found that Old Man Worry was an almost tougher opponent than the Heavyweight boxers I fought. I realized that I had to learn to stop worrying, or worry would sap my vitality and undermine my success. So, little by little, I worked out a system for myself. Here are some of the things I did:

To keep up my courage in the ring, I would give myself a pep talk during the fight. For example, while I was fighting Firpo, I kept saying over and over: “Nothing is going to stop me. He is not going to hurt me. I won’t feel his blows. I can’t get hurt. I am going to keep going, no matter what happens.” Making positive statements like that to myself, and thinking positive thoughts, helped me a lot. It even kept my mind so occupied that I didn’t feel the blows. During my career, I have had my lips smashed, my eyes cut, my ribs cracked, and Firpo knocked me clear through the ropes, and I landed on a reporter’s typewriter and wrecked it. But I never felt even one of Firpo’s blows. There was only one blow that I ever really felt. That was the night Lester Johnson broke three of my ribs. The punch never hurt me; but it affected my breathing. I can honestly say I never felt any other blow I ever got in the ring.

Another thing I did was to keep reminding myself of the futility of worry. Most of my worrying was done before the big bouts, while I was going through training. I would often lie awake at nights for hours, tossing and worrying, unable to sleep. I would worry for fear I might break my hand or sprain my ankle or get my eye cut badly in the first round so I couldn’t co, ordinate my punches. When I got myself into this state of nerves, I used to get out of bed, look into the mirror, and give myself a good talking to. I would say: “What a fool you are to be worrying about something than hasn’t happened and may never happen. Life is short. I have only a few years to live, so I must enjoy life.” I kept saying to myself: “Nothing is important but my health. Nothing is important but my health.” I kept reminding myself that losing sleep and worrying would destroy my health. I found that by saying these things to myself over and over, night after night, year after year, they finally got under my skin, and I could brush off my worries like so much water.

The third, and best, thing I did was pray! While I was training for a bout, I always prayed several times a day. When I was in the ring, I always prayed just before the bell sounded for each round. That helped me fight with courage and confidence. I have never gone to bed in my life without saying a prayer; and I have never eaten a meal in my life without first thanking God for it. Have my prayers been answered? Thousands of times! Part Ten

How I Conquered Worry

32 True Stories

I Prayed to God to Keep Me

Out of an Orphan’s Home

by Kathleen Halter

Housewife, 1074 Roth, University City 14, Missouri.

As a little child, my life was filled with horror. My mother had heart trouble. Day after day, I saw her faint and fall to the floor. We all feared she was going to die, and I believed that all little girls whose mothers died were sent to the Central Wesleyan Orphans’ Home, located in the little town of Warrenton, Missouri, where we lived. I dreaded the thought of going there, and when I was six years old I prayed constantly: “Dear God, please let my mummy live until I am old enough not to go to the orphans’ home.”

Twenty years later, my brother, Meiner, had a terrible injury and suffered intense pain until he died two years later. He couldn’t feed himself or turn over in bed. To deaden his pain, I had to give him morphine hypodermics every three hours, day and night. I did this for two years. I was teaching music at the time at the Central Wesleyan College in Warrenton, Missouri. When the neighbors heard my brother screaming with pain, they would telephone me at college and I would leave my music class and rush home to give my brother another injection of morphine. Every night when I went to bed, I would set the alarm clock to go off three hours later so I would be sure to get up to attend to my brother. I remember that on winter nights I would keep a bottle of milk outside the window, where it would freeze and turn into a kind of ice cream that I loved to eat. When the alarm went off, this ice cream outside the window gave me an additional incentive to get up.

In the midst of all these troubles, I did two things that kept me from indulging in self, pity and worrying and embittering my life with resentment. First, I kept myself busy teaching music from twelve to fourteen hours a day, so I had little time to think of my troubles; and when I was tempted to feel sorry for myself, I kept saying to myself over and over: “Now, listen, as long as you can walk and feed yourself and are free from intense pain, you ought to be the happiest person in the world. No matter what happens, never forget that as long as you live! Never! Never!”

I was determined to do everything in my power to cultivate an unconscious and continuous attitude of gratefulness for my many blessings. Every morning when I awoke, I would thank God that conditions were no worse than they were; and I resolved that in spite of my troubles I would be the happiest person in Warrenton, Missouri. Maybe I didn’t succeed in achieving that goal, but I did succeed in making myself the most grateful young woman in my town, and probably few of my associates worried less than I did.

This Missouri music teacher applied two principles described in this book: she kept too busy to worry, and she counted her blessings. The same technique may be helpful to you. Part Ten

How I Conquered Worry

32 True Stories

I Was Acting Like an

Hysterical Women

by Cameron Shipp

Magazine Writer.

I had been working very happily in the publicity department of the Warner Brothers studio in California for several years. I was a unit man and feature writer. I wrote stories for newspapers and magazines about Warner Brother stars.

Suddenly, I was promoted. I was made the assistant publicity director. As a matter of fact, there was a change of administrative policy, and I was given an impressive title: Administrative Assistant.

This gave me an enormous office with a private refrigerator, two secretaries, and complete charge of a staff of seventy, five writers, exploiters, and radio men. I was enormously impressed. I went straight out and bought a new suit. I tried to speak with dignity. I set up filing systems, made decisions with authority, and ate quick lunches.

I was convinced that the whole public, relations policy of Warner Brothers had descended upon my shoulders. I perceived that the lives, both private and public, of such renowned persons as Bette Davis, Olivia De Havilland, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Ann Sheridan, Alexis Smith, and Alan Hale were entirely in my hands.

In less than a month I became aware that I had stomach ulcers. Probably cancer.

My chief war activity at that time was chairman of the War Activities Committee of the Screen Publicists Guild. I liked to do this work, liked to meet my friends at guild meetings. But these gatherings became matters of dread. After every meeting, I was violently ill. Often I had to stop my car on the way home, pulling myself together before I could drive on. There seemed to be so much to do, so little time in which to do it. It was all vital. And I was woefully inadequate.

I am being perfectly truthful; this was the most painful illness of my entire life. There was always a tight fist in my vitals. I lost weight. I could not sleep. The pain was constant.

So I went to see a renowned expert in internal medicine. An advertising man recommended him. He said this physician had many clients who were advertising men.

This physician spoke only briefly, just enough for me to tell him where I hurt and what I did for a living. He seemed more interested in my job than in my ailments, but I was soon reassured: for two weeks, daily, he gave me every known test. I was probed, explored, X-rayed, and fluoroscoped. Finally, I was instructed to call on him and hear the verdict.

“Mr. Shipp,” he said, leaning back and offering me a cigarette, “we have been through these exhaustive tests. They were absolutely necessary, although I knew of course after my first quick examination that you did not have stomach ulcers.

“But I knew, because you are the kind of man you are and because you do the kind of work you do, that you would not believe me unless I showed you. Let me show you.”

So he showed me the charts and the X-rays and explained them. He showed me I had no ulcers.

“Now,” said the doctor, “this costs you a good deal of money, but it is worth it to you. Here is the prescription: don’t worry.

“Now”, he stopped me as I started to expostulate, “now, I realize that you can’t follow the prescription immediately, so I’ll give you a crutch. Here are some pills. They contain belladonna. Take as many as you like. When you use these up, come back and I’ll give you more. They won’t hurt you. But they will always relax you.

“But remember: you don’t need them. All you have to do is quit worrying.

“If you do start worrying again, you’ll have to come back here and I’ll charge you a heavy fee again. How about it?”

I wish I could report that the lesson took effect that day and that I quit worrying immediately. I didn’t. I took the pills for several weeks, whenever I felt a worry coming on. They worked. I felt better at once.

But I felt silly taking these pills. I am a big man physically. I am almost as tall as Abe Lincoln was, and I weigh almost two hundred pounds. Yet here I was taking little white pills to relax myself. I was acting like an hysterical woman. When my friends asked me why I was taking pills, I was ashamed to tell the truth. Gradually I began to laugh at myself. I said: “See here, Cameron Shipp, you are acting like a fool. You are taking yourself and your little activities much, much too seriously. Bette Da vis and James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson were world, famous before you started to handle their publicity; and if you dropped dead tonight, Warner Brothers and their stars would manage to get along without you. Look at Eisenhower, General Marshall, MacArthur, Jimmy Doolittle and Admiral King, they are running the war without taking pills. And yet you can’t serve as chairman of the War Activities Committee of the Screen Publicists Guild without taking little white pills to keep your stomach from twisting and turning like a Kansas whirlwind.”

I began to take pride in getting along without the pills. A little while later, I threw the pills down the drain and got home each night in time to take a little nap before dinner and gradually began to lead a normal life. I have never been back to see that physician.

But I owe him much, much more than what seemed like a stiff fee at the time. He taught me to laugh at myself. But I think the really skilful thing he did was to refrain from laughing at me, and to refrain from telling me I had nothing to worry about. He took me seriously. He saved my face. He gave me an out in a small box. But he knew then, as well as I know now, that the cure wasn’t in those silly little pills, the cure was in a change in my mental attitude.

The moral of this story is that many a man who is now taking pills would do better to read Chapter 7, and relax. Part Ten

How I Conquered Worry

32 True Stories

I Learned to Stop Worrying

by Watching My Wife

Wash Dishes

by Reverend William Wood

204 Hurlbert Street, Charlevoix, Michigan A few years ago, I was suffering intensely from pains in my stomach. I would awaken two or three times each night, unable to sleep because of these terrific pains. I had watched my father die from cancer of the stomach, and I feared that I too had a stomach cancer, or, at least, stomach ulcers. So I went to Byrne’s Clinic at Petosky, Michigan, for an examination. Dr. Lilga, a stomach specialist, examined me with a fluoroscope and took an X, ray of my stomach. He gave me medicine to make me sleep and assured me that I had no stomach ulcers or cancer. My stomach pains, he said, were caused by emotional strains. Since I am a minister, one of his first questions was: “Do you have an old crank on your church board?”

He told me what I already knew; I was trying to do too much. In addition to my preaching every Sunday and carrying the burdens of the various activities of the church, I was also chairman of the Red Cross, president of the Kiwanis. I also conducted two or three funerals each week and a number of other activities.

I was working under constant pressure. I could never relax. I was always tense, hurried, and high, strung. I got to the point where I worried about everything. I was living in a constant dither. I was in such pain that I gladly acted on Dr. Lilga’s advice. I took Monday off each week, and began eliminating various responsibilities and activities.

One day while cleaning out my desk, I got an idea that proved to be immensely helpful. I was looking over an accumulation of old notes on sermons and other memos on matters that were now past and gone. I crumpled them up one by one and tossed them into the wastebasket. Suddenly I stopped and said to myself: “Bill, why don’t you do the same thing with your worries that you are doing with these notes? Why don’t you crumple up your worries about yesterday’s problems and toss them into the wastebasket?” That one idea gave me immediate inspiration, gave me the feeling of a weight being lifted from my shoulders. From that day to this, I have made it a rule to throw into the wastebasket all the problems that I can no longer do anything about.

Then, one day while wiping the dishes as my wife washed them, I got another idea. My wife was singing as she washed the dishes, and I said to myself: “Look, Bill, how happy your wife is. We have been married eighteen years, and she has been washing dishes all that time. Suppose when we got married she had looked ahead and seen all the dishes she would have to wash during those eighteen years that stretched ahead. That pile of dirty dishes would be bigger than a barn. The very thought of it would have appalled any woman.”

Then I said to myself: “The reason my wife doesn’t mind washing the dishes is because she washes only one day’s dishes at a time.” I saw what my trouble was. I was trying to wash today’s dishes, yesterday’s dishes and dishes that weren’t even dirty yet.

I saw how foolishly I was acting. I was standing in the pulpit, Sunday mornings, telling other people how to live; yet, I myself was leading a tense, worried, hurried existence. I felt ashamed of myself.

Worries don’t bother me any more now. No more stomach pains. No more insomnia. I now crumple up yesterday’s anxieties and toss them into the wastebasket, and I have ceased trying to wash tomorrow’s dirty dishes today.

Do you remember a statement quoted earlier in this book? “The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter.” Why even try it? Part Ten

How I Conquered Worry

32 True Stories

I Found the Answer,

Keep Busy

by Del Hughes

Public Accountant, 607 South Euclid Avenue, Bay City, Michigan.

In 1943 I landed in a veterans’ hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with three broken ribs and a punctured lung. This had happened during a practice Marine amphibious landing off the Hawaiian Islands. I was getting ready to jump off the barge, on to the beach, when a big breaker swept in, lifted the barge, and threw me off balance and smashed me on the sands. I fell with such force that one of my broken ribs punctured my right lung.

After spending three months in the hospital, I got the biggest shock of my life. The doctors told me that I showed absolutely no improvement. After some serious thinking, I figured that worry was preventing me from getting well. I had been used to a very active life, and during these three months I had been flat on my back twenty, four hours a day with nothing to do but think. The more I thought, the more I worried: worried about whether I would ever be able to take my place in the world. I worried about whether I would remain a cripple the rest of my life, and about whether I would ever be able to get married and live a normal life.

I urged my doctor to move me up to the next ward, which was called the “Country Club” because the patients were allowed to do almost anything they cared to do.

In this “Country Club” ward, I became interested in contract bridge. I spent six weeks learning the game, playing bridge with the other fellows, and reading Culbertson’s books on bridge. After six weeks, I was playing nearly every evening for the rest of my stay in the hospital. I also became interested in painting with oils, and I studied this art under an instructor every afternoon from three to five. Some of my paintings were so good that you could almost tell what they were! I also tried my hand at soap and wood carving, and read a number of books on the subject and found it fascinating. I kept myself so busy that I had no time to worry about my physical condition. I even found time to read books on psychology given to me by the Red Cross. At the end of three months, the entire medical staff came to me and congratulated me on “making an amazing improvement”. Those were the sweetest words I had ever heard since the days I was born. I wanted to shout with joy.

The point I am trying to make is this: when I had nothing to do but lie on the flat of my back and worry about my future, I made no improvement whatever. I was poisoning my body with worry. Even the broken ribs couldn’t heal. But as soon as I got my mind off myself by playing contract bridge, painting oil pictures, and carving wood, the doctors declared I made “an amazing improvement”.

I am now leading a normal healthy life, and my lungs are as good as yours.

Remember what George Bernard Shaw said? “The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.” Keep active, keep busy!