Speaker 1: Transcending difficulties and perplexities. Man whom man would be, must
rule the empire of himself in it, must be supreme,
establishing his throne on vanquished will, quelling the anarchy of
hopes and fears, being himself alone. Shelley, have you missed
your aim? Well? The mark is still shining. Did you
faint in the race? Will take breath for the next?
Ella Wheeler Wilcox. To suggest that any degree of blessedness
may be extracted from difficulties and perplexities will doubtless appear
absurd to many. But truth is ever paradoxical, and the
curses of the foolish are the blessings of the wise.
Difficulties arise in ignorance and weakness, and they call for
the attainment of knowledge and the acquisition of strength, as
under standing is acquired by right living. Difficulties become fewer,
and perplexities gradually fade away, like the perishable mists which
they are. Your difficulty is not contained primarily in the
situation which gave rise to it, but in the mental
state with which you regard that situation and which you
bring to bear upon it. That which is difficult to
a child presents no difficulty to the matured mind of
the man, And that which to the mind of an
unintelligent man is surrounded with perplexity, would afford no ground
for perplexity to an intelligent man, to the untutored and
undeveloped mind of the child. How great and apparently insurmountable
appear the difficulties which are involved in the learning of
some simple lesson. How many anxious and laborious hours and
days or even months its solution costs, and frequently how
many tears are shed in hopeless contum of the unmastered
and apparently insurmountable wall of difficulty. Yet the difficulty is
in the ignorance of the child only, and its conquest
and solution is absolutely necessary for the development of intelligence
and for the ultimate welfare, happiness, and usefulness of the child.
Even so, it is with difficulties of life with which
older children are confronted, and which it is imperative for
their own growth and development, that they should solve and surmount.
And each difficulty solved means so much more experience gained,
so much more insight and wisdom acquired. It means a
valuable lesson learned With the added gladness and freedom of
a task successfully accomplished. What is the real nature of
a difficulty? Is it not a situation which is not
fully grasped and understood in all its bearings. As such,
it calls for the development and exercise of a deeper
insight and broader intelligence than has hitherto been exercised. It
is an urgent necessity, calling forth unused energy and demanding
the expression and employment of latent power in hidden resources.
It is therefore a good angel, albeit disguised, a friend
a teacher, and when calmly listened to and rightly understood,
leads to larger blessedness and higher wisdom. Without difficulties, there
could be no progress, no unfoldment, no evolution. Universal stagnation
would prevail, and humanity would perish of anui. Let a
man rejoice when he is confronted with obstacles, for it
means that he has reached the end of some particular
line of indifference or folly, and is now called upon
to summon up all his energy and intelligence in order
to extricate himself and to find a better way. That
the powers within him are crying out for great, greater freedom,
for enlarged exercise and scope. No situation can be difficult
of itself. It is the lack of insight into its centricities,
and the want of wisdom in dealing with it, which
give rise to the difficulty. Immeasurable. Therefore is the gain
of a difficulty transcended. Difficulties do not spring into existence
arbitrarily and accidentally. They have their causes, and they are
called forth by the law of evolution itself, by the
growing necessities of the man's being. Herein resides their blessedness.
There are ways of conduct which end inevitably in complications
and perplexities, and there are ways of conduct which lead
just as inevitably out of troublesome complexities. Howsoever tightly a
man may have bound himself round, he can always unbind
himself into whatsoever morasses of trouble and trackless waste of
perplexity he may have ignorantly wandered. He can always find
his way out again. He can always recover the lost
highway of uninvolved simplicity, which leads straight and clear to
the sunny city of wise and blessed action. But he
will never do this by sitting down and weeping in despair,
nor by complaining and worrying and aimlessly wishing he were
differently situated. His dilemma calls for alertness, logical thought, and
calm calculation. His position requires that he shall strongly command himself,
that he shall think and search, and rouse himself to
strenuous and unremitting exertion in order to regain himself. Worry
and anxiety only serve to heighten the gloom and exaggerate
the magnitude of the difficulty. If he will but quietly
take himself to task and retrace in thought the more
or less intricate way by which he has come to
his present position, he will soon perceive where he made mistakes,
will discover those places where he took a false turn,
and where a little more thoughtfulness, judgment, economy, or self
denial would have saved him. He will see how, step
by step he has involved himself, and how a riper
judgment and clearer wisdom would have enabled him to take
an altogether different, in truer course. Having proceeded thus far
and extracted from his past conduct this priceless grain of
golden wisdom, his difficulty will have already assumed less impregnable proportions,
and he will then be able to bring to bear
upon it the searchlight of dispassionate thought, to thoroughly anatomize it,
to comprehend it in all its details, and to perceive
the relation with which those details bear to the motive
source of action and conduct within himself. This being done,
the difficulty will have ceased, for the straight way out
of it will plainly appear, and the man will have
thus learned for all time his lesson will have gained
an idea of wisdom and a measure of blessedness of
which he can never again be deprived. Just as there
are ways of ignorance, selfishness, folly, and blindness which end
in confusion and perplexity, so there are ways of knowledge,
self denial, wisdom and insight which lead to pleasant and
peaceful consummations. He who knows this will meet difficulties in
a courageous spirit, and in overcoming them, will evolve truth
out of error, bliss out of pain, and peace out
of perturbation. No man can be confronted with a difficulty
which he has not the strength to meet and subdue.
Worry is not merely useless, It is a folly, for
it defeats that power and intelligence which is otherwise equal
to the task. Every difficulty can be overcome if rightly
dealt with. Anxiety is therefore unnecessary. The task, which cannot
be overcome ceases to be a difficulty and become an impossibility,
And anxiety is still unnecessary, for there is only one
way of dealing with an impossibility, namely to submit to it.
The inevitable is the best, heartily know. Where half gods go,
the gods arrive. And just as domestic, social, and economic
difficulties are born of ignorance and lead to riper knowledge,
so every religious doubt, every mental perplexity, every heart but
clouding shadow presages greater spiritual gain is prophetic of a
brighter dawn of intelligence. For him on whom it falls,
it is a great day in the life of a man,
though at the time he knows it not when bewildering,
perplexed cities concerning the mystery of life take possession of
his mind, for it signifies that his era of dead indifference,
of animal sloth, of mere vegetative happiness has come to
an end, and that henceforth he is to live as
an inspiring, self evolving being, no longer a mere human animal.
He will now begin to live as a man, exerting
all his mental energies to the solution of life's problems,
to the answering of those haunting perplexities which are the
sentinels of truth, and which stand at the gate and
threshold of the Temple of Wisdom. He it is who,
when great trials come, nor seeks nor shuns them, but
doth calmly stay. Nor will he ever rest again in
selfless ease and listless ignorance, nor sleekly state himself upon
the swine's husks of fleshly pleasures, nor find a hiding
place from the ceaseless wa whisperings of his heart's dark
and indefinable interrogatories. The divine within him has awakened. A
sleeping god is shaking off the incoherent visions of the night,
never again to slumber, never again to rest, until his
eyes rest upon the full broad day of truth. It
is impossible for such a man to hush for any
length of time the call to his higher purposes and
achievements which are aroused within him, for the awakened faculties
of his being will ceaselessly urge him on to the
unraveling of his perplexities. For him there is no peace
and sin, no more rest and error, no final refuge.
But in wisdom. Great will be the blessedness of such
a man, When, conscious of the ignorance of which his
doubts and perplexities are born, and acknowledging and understanding that ignorance,
not striving to hide himself from it, he earnestly applies
himself to its removal, seeks unremittingly day after day for
that pathway of light, which shall enable him to dispel
all dark shadows, dissolve all his doubts, and find the
solution to all his pressing problems. And as a child
is glad when it has mastered a lesson long toiled over,
just so a man's heart becomes light and free when
he has satisfactorily met some worldly difficulty. Even so, but
to a far greater degree is the heart of a
man rendered joyous and peaceful when some vital and eternal question,
which has been long brooded over and grappled with, is
at last completely answered, and its darkness is forever dispelled.
Do not regard your difficulties and perplexities as portentous of ill.
By doing so you will make them ill. But regard
them as prophetic of good, which indeed they are. Do
not persuade yourself that you can evade them. You cannot.
Do not try to run from them. This is impossible,
for wherever you go, they will still be there with you.
But meet them calmly and bravely. Confront them with all
the dispassion and dignity which you can command. Weigh up
their proportions, analyze them, grasp their details, measure their strength,
understand them, attack them, and finally vanquish them. Thus will
you develop strength and intelligence. Thus will you enter into
one of those by ways of blessedness which are hidden
from the superficial gaze.