There are specialists in these trouble-seekers. Thousands of people go looking for disease. They keep on hand antidotes for malaria, and something for colds, and medicine for every possible ailment, and they are sure they will all come sometime. When they take a journey across the continent or to Europe they carry a regular drug-store with them, a remedy for every supposed ill that they are likely to strike; and, strange to say, these people are always feeling ill, they are always having colds, and catching contagious diseases. Others, who never anticipate trouble, who are always believing the best instead of the worst, will go abroad and never take remedies with them, and they rarely have any trouble.
Some people are always looking for malaria, they are always snuffing about for sewer gas and for impure air; the locality where they live must be unhealthy, too high or too low, too sunny or too shady. If they have any little ache or pain, they are sure it is malaria. Of course they eventually get it because they looked for it, they anticipated it, they expected it They would be disappointed if they found they were mistaken. The fact is that the only thing that is wrong is their own minds. If there is malaria in the mind, if there is miasma in the thought, these things will appear in the body. It is only a question of time.
Some of these trouble-seekers fix on the stomach as the storm-centre of misfortune. They have elaborate mental charts of what “agrees with” them and what “disagrees with” them, and are always secretly hoping to be able to find some new indigestible viand. They swallow a bit of dyspepsia with every mouthful of food, for they feel sure that everything they eat will hurt them. The suspicious thought, the fear thought, reacts upon the digestion, demoralizes the gastric juice or prevents its secretion entirely, and, of course, there is trouble.
Some of these peculiar individuals find the air the most prolific source of their quarry. The whole French nation is continually looking for trouble from this source. An American in Paris who leaves a bedroom window open is warned against sore eyes, pneumonia, colds, and sudden death. If there is a window open anywhere, these suspecters of aerial mischief expect a cold, and are sure to get it. The very fear, the very anxiety, demoralizes the natural resisting power of the body and makes it susceptible.
If there is a contagious disease anywhere in the neighborhood, the trouble-expecters are sure to contract it. If one of the children coughs, or has a little too much color in the cheek, or does not feel hungry, they are certain that the dreaded disease must have begun its deadly work.
The saddest cases of all, perhaps, are those who have a fixed idea that some disease, usually supposed to be inherited, will ultimately kill them. The self-convinced victims of weak lungs, weak hearts, weak stomachs brood and dwell upon their threatened physical disasters, making them enter into every plan and calculation of life, throwing their pall over every activity of the family. All that thousands of such people need to be well and happy is a better mental state, a buoyant, hopeful attitude and the activity that would come with such a philosophy. These people are the prey of quacks of every kind, they are the “dope fiends” that swallow our millions of gallons of concoctions whose advertisements disgust the eye of every newspaper reader, they support many a fashionable physician in luxury, they make life tenfold more miserable than by any standard of right it ought to be. I wish that I had the power to stir the inmost soul of all these people to realize how much their own fate lies in the control of their own thoughts, how effort of will, by helping them to hold the healing, life-giving thought, might enable them to throw off every hampering ailment, physical and mental, and make their lives the grand expression of the divinity that is the essence of us all.
Certain people are always complaining of their hard lot and poverty. They go about with disaster written in their very faces; they are walking advertisements of their own failures, their own listless, nerveless, lifeless inactivity; they are always talking, but never doing.
I know a bright, energetic young man who has started in business for himself, but who has formed a most unfortunate habit of talking down his business to everybody. When anybody asks him how his business is getting along he says: “Poorly, poorly; no business; doing absolutely nothing; just barely making a living; no money in it; I wish I could sell out; I made a great mistake in going into this line of business; I would have been a great deal better off on salary.” This man has formed such a habit of talking his business down that even when business is good, he still calls it poor. He radiates a discouraging atmosphere, he flings out discouraging suggestions, and makes you feel tired and disgusted that a young man of such promise and such possibilities should so drown his prospects and strangle his ambition.
This habit is especially unfortunate in an employer, because it is contagious; it destroys the confidence of the employees in him and in the business. People do not like to work for a pessimist. They thrive in a cheerful, optimistic atmosphere, and will do more and better work there than in one of discouragement and depression. The man who talks his business down cannot possibly do so well as the man who talks his business up. The habit of talking everything down sets the mind toward the negative side, the destructive side, instead of toward the positive and creative, and is fatal to achievement. It creates a discordant environment. No man can live upward when he is talking downward.
The imagination, wrongly used, is one of our worst foes. I know people who live in perpetual unhappiness and discomfort because they imagine they are being abused, slighted, neglected, and talked about. They think themselves the target for all sorts of evils, the object of envy, jealousy, and all kinds of ill will. The fact is, most such ideas are delusions and have no reality whatever.
Now this is a most unfortunate state of mind to get into. It kills happiness, it demoralizes usefulness, it throws the mind out of harmony, and life itself becomes unsatisfactory.
People who think such thoughts make themselves perpetually wretched by surrounding themselves with an atmosphere reeking with pessimism. They always wear black glasses, which make everything around them seem draped in mourning; they see nothing but black. All the music of their lives is set to the minor key; there is nothing cheerful or bright in their world.
These people have talked poverty, failure, hard luck, fate, and hard times so long that their entire being is imbued with pessimism. The cheerful qualities of the mind have atrophied from neglect and disuse, while their pessimistic tendencies have been so overdeveloped that their minds cannot regain a normal, healthy, cheerful balance.
These people carry a gloomy, disagreeable, uncomfortable influence with them wherever they go. Nobody likes to converse with them, because they are always telling their stories of hard luck and misfortune. With them, times are always hard, money scarce, and society “going to the bad.” After a while they become pessimistic cranks, with morbid minds, really partially unbalanced, and people avoid them as they would miasmatic swamps, full of chills and fever.
Sometimes a whole household becomes infected by the presence of one morose, discontented member, and its peace is ruined. Such a contrary person is always out of harmony with his environment, has no pleasure himself, and, as far as he is able, prevents others from having any. Such states of mind not only induce disease, but also prevent benefit from ordinary curative processes. George C. Tenney, from experience in a sanatorium, writes:
“To help a person who is at ‘outs’ with everything and everybody is like trying to save a drowning man who is determined to drown. Some people spend most of their time in hunting themselves over for some new ailment, and when they have found it they are the most happy that they ever are. Immediately they hang it about their necks, where it becomes an additional millstone to drag them down. Nothing does so much to obstruct the work of restoring normal conditions as for the individual to wage continual war with his situation and surroundings. Giving medicine or treatment to a person whose mind is in the turmoil of discontent is like pouring water into heated oil. Irritation and disturbance is the consequence. Healing is the work of divine power, and in the use of divinely appointed means for the recovery of health it is as necessary