VII Living Life Over Again
During a terrific storm a few years ago a ship was driven far out of her course, and, helpless and disabled, was carried into a strange bay. The water supply gave out, and the crew suffered the agony of thirst, yet dared not drink of the salt water in which their vessel floated. In the last extremity they lowered a bucket over the ship’s side, and in desperation quaffed the beverage they thought was sea-water. But to their joy and amazement the water was fresh, cool and life-giving. They were in a fresh-water arm of the sea, and they did not know it. They had simply to reach down and accept the new life and strength for which they prayed.
Man, to-day, heart-weary with the sorrow, sin and failure of his past life, feels that he could live a better life if he could only have another chance, if he could only live life over again, if he could only start afresh with his present knowledge and experience. He looks back with regretful memory to the golden days of youth and sadly mourns his wasted chances. He then turns hopefully to the thought of a life to come. But, helpless, he stands between the two ends of life, yet thirsting for the chance to live a new life, according to his bettered condition for living it. In his blindness and unknowing, he does not realize, like the storm-driven sailors, that the new life is all around him; he has but to reach out and take it. Every day is a new life, every sunrise but a new birth for himself and the world, every morning the beginning of a new existence for him, a new, great chance to put to new and higher uses the results of his past living.
The man who looks back upon his past life and says, “I have nothing to regret,” has lived in vain. The life without regret is the life without gain. Regret is but the light of fuller wisdom, from our past, illumining our future. It means that we are wiser to-day than we were yesterday. This new wisdom means new responsibility, new privileges; it is a new chance for a better life. But if regret remain merely “regret,” it is useless; it must become the revelation of new possibilities, and the inspiration and source of strength to realize them. Even omnipotence could not change the past, but each man, to a degree far beyond his knowing, holds his future in his own hands.
If man were sincere in his longing to live life over he would get more help from his failures. If he realize his wasted golden hours of opportunity, let him not waste other hours in useless regret, but seek to forget his folly and to keep before him only the lessons of it. His past extravagance of time should lead him to minify his loss by marvellous economy of present moments. If his whole life be darkened by the memory of a cruel wrong he has done another, if direct amends be impossible to the injured one, passed from life, let him make the world the legatee to receive his expressions of restitution. Let his regret and sorrow be manifest in words of kindness and sympathy, and acts of sweetness and love given to all with whom he comes in contact. If he regrets a war he has made against one individual, let him place the entire world on his pension list. If a man make a certain mistake once, the only way he can properly express his recognition of it is not to make a similar mistake later. Josh Billings once said: “A man who is bitten twice by the same dog is better adapted to that business than any other.”
There are many people in this world who want to live life over because they take such pride in their past. They resemble the beggars in the street who tell you they “have seen better days.” It is not what man was that shows character; it is what he progressively is. Trying to obtain a present record on a dead past is like some present-day mediocrity that tries to live on its ancestry. We look for the fruit in the branches of the family tree, not in the roots. Showing how a family degenerated from a noble ancestor of generations ago to its present representative is not a boast;—it is an unnecessary confession. Let man think less of his own ancestors and more of those he is preparing for his posterity; less of his past virtue, and more of his future.
When man pleads for a chance to live life over, there is always an implied plea of inexperience, of a lack of knowledge. This is unworthy, even of a coward. We know the laws of health, yet we ignore them or defy them every day. We know what is the proper food for us, individually, to eat, yet we gratify our appetites and trust to our cleverness to square the account with Nature somehow. We know that success is a matter of simple, clearly defined laws, of the development of mental essentials, of tireless energy and concentration, of constant payment of price,—we know all this, and yet we do not live up to our knowledge. We constantly eclipse ourselves by ourselves, and then we blame Fate.
Parents often counsel their children against certain things, and do them themselves, in the foolish hope that the children will believe their ears in preference to their eyes. Years of careful teaching of a child to be honest and truthful may be nullified in an instant by a parent’s lying to a conductor about a child’s age to save a nickel. That may be a very expensive street-car ride for the child,—and for the parent. It may be part of the spirit of the age to believe that it is no sin to cheat a corporation or a trust, but it is unwise to give the child so striking an example at an age when it cannot detect the sophistry.
Man’s only plea for a chance to live life again is that he has gained in wisdom and experience. If he be really in earnest, then he can live life over, he can live life anew, he can live the new life that comes to him day by day. Let him leave to the past, to the aggregated thousands of yesterdays, all their mistakes, sin, sorrow, misery and folly, and start afresh. Let him close the books of his old life, let him strike a balance, and start anew, crediting himself with all the wisdom he has gained from his past failure and weakness, and charging himself with the new duties and responsibilities that come from the possession of his new capital of wisdom. Let him criticise others less and himself more,—and start out bravely in this new life he is to live.
What the world needs is more day-to-day living; starting in the morning with fresh, clear ideals for that day, and seeking to live that day, and each successive hour and moment of that day, as if it were all time and all eternity. This has in it no element of disregard for the future, for each day is set in harmony with that future. It is like the sea-captain heading his vessel toward his port of destination, and day by day keeping her steaming toward it. This view of living kills morbid regret of the past, and morbid worry about the future. Most people want large, guaranteed slices of life; they would not be satisfied with manna fresh every day, as was given to the children of Israel; they want grain elevators filled with daily bread.
Life is worth living if it be lived in a way that is worth living. Man does not own his life,—to do with as he will. He has merely a life-interest in it. He must finally surrender it,—with an accounting. At each New Year tide it is common to make new resolutions, but in the true life of the individual each day is the beginning of a New Year if he will only make it so. A mere date on the calendar of eternity is no more a divider of time than a particular grain of sand divides the desert.
Let us not make heroic resolutions so far beyond our strength that the resolution becomes a dead memory within a week; but let us promise ourselves that each day will be the new beginning of a newer, better and truer life for ourselves, for those around us, and for the world.