 To think or not to think—that is the question raised by different exponents of the new thought. Most of our teachers have been telling us that by thought we are created and by thought we are saved from death. But Sydney Flower says thought is killing us all. We are clogging up with Brain-Ash. And now I come to think of it, Jesus of Nazareth said, “Take NO thought.” Evidently thought and its results are decidedly important to us who mean to Live and let who will do the dying. But I fancy the thought advocates are not so far off as might appear. Truth is ever paradoxical. And it is her paradoxes which MAKE us think, and do it in spite of ourselves. Truly, it were vain to say, Stop thinking. It is useless to say, Forget. And after all comes my own little suspicion that it is not thinking and remembering, but the kind of thinking and remembering we do, which chokes us with Brain-Ash. The child thinks, and I suspect him of thinking harder and more nearly true than does the grown-up. But a child thinks new thoughts; or rather he thinks the same old thoughts with variations. And all his thoughts are made light and bright by vivid and hope-full imagination. It is as if his thoughts by some divine alchemy of imagination are transmuted into gas or electricity before his brain is stoked with them. There is no Brain-Ash in a child; there is only glow and white light of electricity. But we grown-ups are stingy with our fuel. We put out the alchemic fires of imagination and burn our Facts direct. Our consciousness is like a little bird in a wooden hogshead. It flies around and around, and bruises its poor little wings against the sides; it soars three feet and bumps its head; it falls three feet and—thinks. “Life is only a wooden hogshead of a treadmill,” it says, and willingly gives up its little ghost. In a child's mind, even stone is endowed with life; to the grown-up everything is dead. So the child’s thoughts are alive and the grown-up’s are dead. The child’s thoughts being alive have power to move him—truly, “he is full of life.” But the grown-up is full of death and Brain-Ash. Because the child’s thoughts are alive he is so interested in the Now that it is easy to forget the past and ignore the future. The grown-up’s thoughts being dead, he takes refuge from the stench—he seeks again the live thoughts of his youth. The cure of Age is interest, enthusiasm and their consequent activity of mind and body. “Assume a virtue if you have it not,” and thus re-call it. Play with your work. Wipe out the past, forget the future, and play. Live now. Be a child now. Endow with life all things you touch. Permit nothing to remain cut and dried. Cut it by another pattern, your own brand new one. Talk to it, smile at it, imagine things to it, and of it. Quit being serious. “Dignity is a peculiar carriage invented to cover up the defects of the mind.” Quit covering up anything. Be a child, smiling. Oh, but you can’t feel so? Nobody asked you to feel it. Just Do it, DO it, DO IT!— and never mind feeling. Practice makes perfect and feeling follows. Go in to win and keep at it, until you are the happiest kid in the bunch. ***** Mr. Flower says you cannot have youth and wisdom. He intimates that wisdom goes with Age. Dearie, don’t you believe it. The wisdom which goes with Age is a dirty little wooden hogshead counterfeit. Only in proportion as one stays young is he wise. Real wisdom is in The Limitless. It is in the electric atmosphere which is breathed by children and fools. In the hogshead it is deadened by the heavy effluvia of dead things. All true wisdom, all poetry, all art, all invention, comes to the child-brain in The Limitless. Only as poets, artists, inventors get out of the hogshead do they find that which lives, and stirs the dead things within. |
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