Don't Talk About Your Troubles
SITTING by my window the other day, I saw a little fellow who was running on the sidewalk, stub his toe and fall with a great thump. It must have hurt him severely, and I expected to hear a tremendous outcry. Instead of that he got upon his feet as soon as possible, rubbed his head, looking around to see if there was anybody to pity him, and not discovering any one, trotted on without a whimper. “There,” said I to myself, “that is about the way we grown folks act. Our troubles are never half so serious when there is no one to whom we can explain how dreadfully we are hurt.” Whereupon I fell into a brown study upon the folly of giving voice to every little discomfort. The habit certainly develops our selfishness. The common human infirmity is for each to make himself the center of the universe, and to look upon every event as of more or less consequence in exact proportion as it affects his interests. He glances over the newspaper account of the flood that swept a village away and drowned twenty-five people, giving it scarcely a thought; but he speaks again and again of a freshet that carried off a rod or so of his fence and did sundry other small damage. He talks it over on every occasion, with all its tiresome details, because, forsooth, it touched his sacred possessions. He can dispose, with some old threadbare proverb, of a calamity under which another may be writhing, and he fancies that he has settled the matter handsomely; but let some disagreeable thing be said of him, you’ll not hear the last of it for some while. And the worst of it is, like the story of the three black crows, the grievance grows with every repetition, till you take him as the most cruelly injured individual upon the planet. Since this is an infirmity of the race to which we belong, it is only common prudence for us to guard against it. If it makes us selfish to demand sympathy in every little trouble, let us see to it that we avoid speaking of our trials. By talking about discomforts, we give them proportionately more attention, and by so much we increase their power to annoy us. If we have something to take our thought, a hot, dusty day on the railroad train will pass by without seriously incommoding us; but let us give our time to fanning and fretting, constantly commenting upon the heat and dust, and the frequency of stops, and we will get all the discomfort possible out of the trip. If one gets up in the morning with a pain in his head, and begins to tell everybody who asks after his health how much he is afraid that he is about to have one of his dreadful nervous headaches, and what untold agony he suffers with them, and how he has worn out this and that remedy, etc., if it is at all possible, he will probably bring about the result he fears. Not infrequently a little bright, thankful talk, casting the care most fully upon, and getting an added touch of faith and a shining in the joy of, the Lord, will help one over the bad places so easily that his morning headache will be forgotten long before night.—Christian Witness.