Not content with instilling fear of possibly real things, many mothers and most nurses invent all sorts of bugbears and bogies to frighten poor babies into obedience. They even attempt to induce sleep by telling children, “If you don’t go right to sleep, a great big bear will come and eat you up!” How much sleep would a grown man get in a situation where this was a real possibility? Fear of the dark would seldom exist if parents carefully showed children that nothing is different in the dark from what it is in the light. Instead of so doing, they take pains to people the mysterious dark with every sort of ogre and monster that human imagination has been able to conjure up. Some one has well expressed in verse this cruel but too common sin against healthy-minded childhood:
“He who checks a child with terror,
Stops its play and stills its song,
Not alone commits an error,
But a grievous moral wrong
Mothers waste much energy in worrying about their children. Some of them cannot take a moment’s comfort while their boys or girls are out of their sight. How many times, in imagination, have you seen your children tumble out of trees and off sheds? How many times have you pictured them drowning when they went for a sail or a skate? How often have you had visions of your boy being brought home from the base-ball or foot-ball grounds with broken limbs or scarred face? When none of these things happened, what had you to compensate for the hours of mental anguish, with consequent lowering of vitality and physical tone? Such useless imaginings of evil make many women old and haggard before their time. The worst of it is that so many think it is their duty, and a sign of their great love to worry all the time.
With fearsome and anxious mothers surrounding children with an atmosphere of dread, and suggesting to them new and unthought-of objects of fear, it is not astonishing that the whole world seems burdened and bowed down under a fearful weight of fear and anxiety. Go into almost any gathering, no matter how gay and happy the crowds seem to be, you will find, if you question any one of even the gayest, that the canker-worm of fear gnaws at the heart in some form. The fear of accident, of sickness, of poverty, of death, of some terrible misfortune, still lingers during the greatest apparent gayety. Thousands of people thus pass their lives under the shadow of fear, haunted by the dread of some vague, impending evil.
Many men and women narrow their lives by worrying over what may happen to-morrow. The family cannot afford to have any little, legitimate pleasure, to travel, or to take the leading magazines or papers. They cannot afford much-needed vacations. They must economize on clothes, on food even, and on every form of culture or recreation costing money, simply because times may be hard next year. “There may be a financial panic,” urges the pessimist. “Some of the children may be sick, the times may be bad, our crops may fail, some business venture may not succeed. We can’t tell what might happen, but we must prepare for the worst” The lives of hundreds of families are mutilated, sometimes utterly ruined, by this bugbear of misfortune just ahead.
One of the worst features of this parsimonious, anxious, untrustful way of living is that it stunts the development of young lives, and throws its dark shadow over the future as well as the present. A girl or boy, for instance, should go to college this year. Time flies quickly, and almost before they realize it they will be too old to go. But the father and mother assure themselves that they cannot afford any extra expense this year; the children must wait a little longer; and every year it is the same: “They must wait a little longer.”
How many men and women are handicapped in their life-work, robbed of their possibilities, because lacking an education which parents, in anticipation of reverses that never came, postponed until too late?
No one should discourage proper economy and frugality, but this gloomy fear that “something may happen,” this postponing enjoyment, education, culture, travel, books, innocent pleasures of every kind, until the sensibilities become hardened, until the aesthetic faculties are dead, is a disease of narrow, untrustful souls, which every sane person should combat.
Think of the millions of human creatures that God has made and placed on this glad earth, endowed with every faculty possible to enable them to enjoy life, wasting precious years in worrying and fretting lest something may happen.
How pitiful are the anxious, wrinkled faces, the gray hairs, the unhappy expressions of those who worry about possible misfortunes! Not one wrinkle in a thousand, not one gray hair in a million, has been produced by actual ills. The things which turn hair gray and plough fair faces with cruel furrows, which rob the step of elasticity, and take the buoyancy from life are bridges that never were crossed, misfortunes that never came. The sorrows and trials which actually come to us are, except in rare instances, trifling, compared with the things about which we worry, but which never come to pass.
What a waste of energy and human life is involved in this pernicious habit of anticipating evil! Think of the amount of work you could have accomplished by the mental and physical force you have expended in fearing what might happen—but which did not. Think of the wasted hours in which you planned what you would do if misfortune should come.
If we could only rid ourselves of imaginary troubles, our lives would be infinitely happier and healthier. Thus one of the greatest tasks in character-building is to eliminate, to uproot, to wipe out completely the baleful effects of fear in all its varieties of manifestation. No one can lead a naturally healthy, sunny, helpful, harmonious life while living in a fear environment. No one can hope to be entirely happy and successful without the destruction, the eradication, of the fear-germs. Were this done, the world would be gloriously changed for the better. It is the duty of every individual to conquer this common enemy in his own mind, and to do all he can to wrest other people, especially the young, from the dominion of this phantom monster. Happily, thinkers and investigators have proven that this may be done, and it is a glorious prophecy that coming generations will be taught to banish all fear, to march, clear-eyed and confident, toward the goal of perfect happiness.
Chapter V.
Overcoming Fear
Fear-thought, the arch-enemy of mankind, can be eliminated from the habit of thought—can be entirely eradicated; but not by repression.—Horace Fletcher.
IN setting about the overcoming of fear, we must first understand what it is we fear. It is always something that has not yet happened; that is, it is non-existent. Trouble is an imaginary something that we think of, and which frightens us with its possibility. Suppose you are afraid of yellow-fever; that is, you are afraid of the suffering caused by the disease, and especially of its probable fatal termination. As long as you have not the fever, it does not exist for you. If you have it, it has not killed you yet, and it may not do so. The most that can actually exist for you at any one time is pain and physical weakness. A state of terror aggravates every disagreeable feature of the illness and makes a fatal issue almost certain. It is because this disease is so feared that it is so often fatal, and even its contagion seems to be governed very largely by the fear people have of it, in spite of germs, and microscopic proofs of their part in the development of the disease. That is, the germs do not often affect a normal, healthy, fearless person.
During a yellow-fever epidemic at New Orleans, in the days before all the doctors had agreed that the disease is contagious, a young Northern teacher arrived at Natchez, Miss., in a high fever. Dr. Samuel Cartwright was called. The next morning he, according to Dr. William H. Holcomb, called the officers of the hotel and all the regular boarders into the parlor and made them a speech something like this:
“This young lady has yellow-fever. It is not contagious. None of you will take it from her; and if you will follow my advice, you will save this town from a panic, and a panic is the hot-bed of an epidemic. Say nothing about this case. Ignore it absolutely. Let the ladies of the house help nurse her, and take flowers and delicacies to her, and act altogether as if it were some every-day affair, unattended by danger. It will save her life, and perhaps, in the long run, many others.”
The advised course