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Of
Serenity
SERENITY
is a sort of spiritual capital; it is that residuum
of spiritual production which remains over to assist
future production. If we have no serenity left after
a spiritual experience of any kind, we may be sure that
our life, to that extent at least, has been in vain.
Do you read, do you smoke, do
you dine, do you take a walk, do you visit a picture
show? What is the residue of impression left on your
mind when the hour is past? If it is one of pleasurable
content, an increment of quiet happiness, the experience
has been worth while. If it is one of uneasy excitement,
you have gained nothing. You have toiled unprofitably.
For the spirit, like the body, must see the result of
its labour; and that result [Page 233] is
a fund of abiding serenity. How else are we to face
the future and the unknown without perturbation? If
our whole existence is to be made up of excitement,
how shall fortitude survive? Those people who think
to lose their unhappiness in a chain of endless activity,
accomplish only a temporary alleviation for themselves.
The more engrossed they become in mere activity for
its own sake, the more futile will it seem to them at
last. Rather than increasing their store of serenity
against the foul weather of poverty or age or decrepitude,
they have been spending it lavishly in the thousand
channels of strenuous activity.
As Emerson has it somewhere,
our real life is in the silent moments. It may be in
the pauses of conversation, during the midday rest by
a running water, or after the guests are gone and the
coals settle in the grate; but the inner life does not
receive its pleasure or its nourishment in the doing
of things; its normal joy is in accessions of serenity;
it subscribes [Page 234] willingly
to Stevenson’s saying that gentleness and cheerfulness
are above all morality, – are the greatest virtues.
Yet this is no plea for idle
shiftlessness. The inert and careless, who are incorrigible
bystanders at the great pageant of life, seldom taste
true serenity. They are for ever infected with a feverish
dissatisfaction. The slow malaria of inefficiency is
in their bones. Too supine for effort or accomplishment,
they miss the zest of relaxation, and dribble away their
days in a woebegone dyspeptic indolence. They have no
proper conception of the joys of leisure; they are as
unfortunate as those who must be for ever on the go.
It has never occurred to them to take hold of this life
sturdily in their two hands, to work with a will, to
play with a will, to loaf with a will.
But the wise man yields himself
to the moment; he is glad of the relish in toil, glad
of the serenity in rest. He does not belong to the leisure
class nor yet to the working class; for in his philosophy
there should be no leisure [Page 235] class;
leisure should be common as air or water, for men to
take as they need; and work should be as delightful
as leisure. There are thousands of men who do not know
how to rest, who have almost no faculty of enjoyment;
but there never yet was a man who did not love work,
– his own proper work in the natural exercise
of his powers.
In any case, to be serene does
not mean to be idle. For serenity of spirit may be kept
in the midst of activity; and the most effective workers
are those who are never hurried, never flustered, but
retain in the thickest turmoil of daily life an imperturbable
demeanour and steadiness of mind. Your nervous individual,
whose fund of serenity is low, rushes about in a frenzy
of fussy excitement, achieving nothing but his own destruction.
In that most detestable of all vulgarisms, he is a “hustler.”
God help him! He is distraught with a mental rabies;
he has been bitten by the greed or envy of commercialism,
or some other of the black dogs of modern civilization
[Page 236], and his finish will not
be a wholesome thing to see.
Our day has almost made it seem
true that to live without madness, one must live without
haste. The man engaged in active business, as it is
called, is very much in the position of a ranchman in
a stampede. If he loses his head through a moment’s
agitation, his doom is written. He must preserve in
the irrational whirl around him at least a remnant of
serenity. To be wholly engrossed in his surroundings,
to lose his self-command, is destruction.
Serenity is the atmosphere of
poise, the still air in which the nicely adjusted balance
of all our powers may be maintained. To preserve it
we should be willing to sacrifice everything but life
itself. Yet it is not to be had in exchange for any
possession or characteristic. It is a habit, a moral
attribute, a mode of thinking; it is one of the tides
of the mind. And like so many of the best things in
our mortal existence, it is greatly a matter of [Page
237] temperament. All men are born in bondage
and unequal; and some are blessed by the fairy godmother
with happier dispositions than others. Still there is
no despair for any of us; if we have not the benign
temper, the temperament which makes for happiness, if
is our first business to acquire it. Why go through
this world perpetually disgruntled, when men will concede
so much to a smile? He who is serene commands a digestive
that defies dyspepsia and will carry the buoyancy of
youth into the ruts of old age.
When you pass from the realm
of actual life into the realm of art, serenity becomes
the noblest of all attributes. In the world of beauty,
where every line, every shade, every tone, is adjusted
in considerations of permanence, how shall we tolerate
anything that is not serenely alive? An art in which
there is no serenity can no more mirror nature and human
life for us, than a ruffled stream can reflect the trees
above it [Page 238].
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