Live Your Life Over by Arthur W. Spaulding

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 28, 1913

Live Your Life Over

By Arthur W. Spaulding

ARTHUR W. SPAULDING

It is one of the most common and seemingly most futile wishes of dissatisfied humanity: “I wish I could live my life over again. The knowledge I have gained would enable me to avoid the mistakes of my youth, and to build a better manhood.”

If you are a father, I wish, in good faith, to invite you to do just that,—to live your life over. Now do not put to me in scorn the question of Nicodemus. It is true that you cannot take yourself back to the age of five or ten; but in your child you have as a gift from God your childhood over again. Your little son is, in all probability, the replica of your boyhood. In him you have your life at its beginning; in yourself, you say, you have the wisdom to form that life aright. Live over your life in your child; make him what you would like to have been. If you cannot do this, it is good evidence that you could not make your own life over, if there should be the miracle of restoring you your youth. You might, indeed, have dreams of what you would be, but so had you dreams when a boy. Demonstrate the practicality of your garnered wisdom by applying it to your second life, your son.

“The trouble with that,” remarked a father the other day, “is that your child will not do what you tell him.”

And the trouble with that remark is that it confuses telling with teaching. Very likely, if you had your own life to live over, you would not do what you might tell yourself to do. Is that not the trouble now? “For to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.” It takes more than telling to form right living. The father who can only tell has not learned how to live; and it is not strange if his boy has through experience discovered that fact, and so discounts the telling.

“What, then, would you have us do?” you ask. I would have you live your life over again.

First, when you were living your boyhood life, how much time did you spend with yourself? You could never get away from yourself, could you? Summer and winter, day and night, work-day and Sabbath, in schoolroom and at supper table, on ball ground and in cornfield, there you were, Johnny Smith, working out with yourself that puzzle called life. Never a joy came to Johnny Smith that you did not share, never a trouble in which you had no part, never a problem that you did not have to tackle. Now if you were going to live your life over again, would you be just that intimate with yourself? Or would you spend most of your time with the man you hoped to be? Your attitude toward your little son will show whether you are sincere in your wish to live your life over again, or whether, if you had that miraculous chance, you would reject it for the sake of catering to your man's life.

For, fathers, it is certain that if we are going to be successful in applying our wisdom to the better shaping of our other lives, we shall have to be very intimate with our sons. We shall have to think their thoughts, grasp their conceptions, perceive their difficulties, join in the formation of their ambitions, participate in their joys and sorrows. To be a little more specific, we shall have, for instance, to take pleasure in an automobile ride on a tip-tilted chair, to see in the stars the winking eyes of the angels, to feel as great an anxiety over a problem in fractions as over the meeting of a mortgage, to find a plausible reason for choosing to be a Wilberforce rather than a Bonaparte, and to sense in all their keenness the ambrosial delight of raspberry jam and the throat-contracting smart of a hickory switch. The having of such experiences means that we are very intimate with our sons. And unless we are so intimate, let us drop the pretense of wishing to live our lives over again.

Of course, not every father can be so constantly with his son as the boy is with himself, but nearly every father can be with his son a great deal more than he is. I know it does not seem easy to drop the burdens of our workaday lives, to enter the realm of childhood. But there is a divine word that touches that: “Except ye . . . become as little children, ye shall not enter

into the kingdom of heaven.” The worries belong to the devil: drop them, and enter the kingdom of heaven, which is the realm of childhood. You will find that to think the thoughts of a little child is a great destroyer of anxiety, a great simplifier of life's problems. And it is the first step in a most delightful work of romance,—the remaking of your life. When through this means you have established the confidence of your child in yourself, you will find that, though he gets from you much more than talk, he will also do what you tell him.

In the second place, you must work out some plans. You must make an environment that will shape aright this other life of yours. For if you will remember, when you were a boy it was not merely what you heard, it was chiefly the circumstances into which you came, that shaped your life. If you expect your son to escape your errors and build worthily, you must make his environments such as will help him,—not an easy place, understand, neither too hard a place, but a situation chosen judiciously for the purpose you have in mind.

Let me use for illustration one little boy whom I know well. His father recognizes in him some very familiar traits. He is eager but dreamy, tender-hearted but stubborn, reticent, with a dread of punishment or reprobation that tempts to prevarication, having a sense of humor that is apt to go beyond bounds, and an appetite that always needs curbing. Awaiting development in the period of puberty are, on the one hand, strong elemental passions, and, on the other, moral concepts that promise great powers of control. Left to himself, he would be a lazy, greedy bookworm, delighting in dreams of wonderful accomplishments he could never realize, and in the world of ideas lost to practical life.

Now, if his father should merely talk to him, saying: “Willie, you mustn't read so much, you must work more, you must control your appetite, you must tell the truth, you must not play practical jokes,” Willie, secretive by nature, would soon learn how to dissemble before his father, in order that he might follow his natural tendencies, to overcome which his father would be giving him no real help.

But his father realizes that, besides instruction, the boy must have conditions given him wherewith to build his life. He has therefore taken him into the country, where he has the best chance to deal with concrete things, and not merely with ideas. He is given his regular duties; the wood-box, the stable, and certain features of the garden work belong to him. In the first of these he has now graduated from his father's tutelage; in the second he needs only supervision and the encouragement of an occasional lift; the third has too many advantages of companionship ever to allow father and son to be long separated.

The books he reads are selected by his parents, and include not merely storybooks, but books of juvenile science. And his father helps in his efforts to put into practise what he reads. The flying-machine over which for months he dreamed, and which, after long trying to create, he was about to throw aside for some new fancy, was brought, by his father's advice and assistance, to a wheeled creation with wings, that would at least run on the ground. Through that experience he learned somewhat the limitations of his powers, but yet was gratified and encouraged with the production of something real. Otherwise, he would have withdrawn further into his dreamland.

The danger of his becoming a recluse is met by his participation in his parents' neighborhood missionary work, in which are also opportunities to teach forgetfulness of self and self-control in appetite and passion. And further, there is an occasional trip to more distant places, in which his love of adventure overcomes his shyness in meeting strangers. And by the active physical life he is made to lead, in work and in play, it is sought to forestall, as he approaches manhood, the dangers of the sedentary life his tendency toward literature would induce. In all this, it is true, he must be told many things, but the telling comes as a part, and not the whole, of the teaching.

It is through such a living of life with our children, such a particular thought for their training, and such a participation in their activities, that there comes to the parent the opportunity of living life over again. It is a very real opportunity, a very real joy; and I think, because it carries more of the element of unselfishness, it is very much more of a joy than the mystic trick of starting ourselves in life again could possibly be. And in the effort it takes to direct these fresh young lives aright, will be found the best corrective of our twisted and distorted lives. There will be a double triumph of reform.

Sanitarium, Cal.