Chapter 11 Chapter 3 Drive away worries and liberate your mind

When we are not busy, there is often a vacuum in our minds.At this time, emotions such as worry, fear, hatred, jealousy and envy will fill in and drive out the peaceful and happy elements in our thoughts. Keep yourself busy and your blood will start to circulate and your mind will start to sharpen.Keeping yourself busy is one of the cheapest medicines in the world, and it's also one of the best. A student in one of my adult education classes, Marion Douglas, told me that two mishaps had happened to his family.For the first time, he lost his 5-year-old daughter, a child he loved very much.Both he and his wife thought they couldn't take the blow.Even worse, "October later we had another daughter—and she only lived five days."

The barrage of blows was almost unbearable, the father told us: "I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I couldn't rest or relax. It was a fatal blow to my spirit and my confidence was gone. Sleeping pills and travel didn't help. My The body seemed to be clamped in a pair of large pliers, and the pliers became tighter and tighter." "However, thank God, I also have a 4-year-old son who taught us how to solve our problems. One afternoon, as I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself, he asked me 'Dad, can you build me a Boat'. I'm really not interested, but this little guy is very annoying, so I have to rely on him.

"It took me about three hours to build that toy boat, and when it was done I realized that those three hours were the first time I'd felt relaxed in many days. "This discovery woke me up and gave me the energy to think for the first time in months. I learned that when you're busy doing mental work, it's hard to worry anymore. To me As far as I'm concerned, shipbuilding took all my worries away, so I decided to keep myself busy. "The next night, I went through each room and made a list of everything that needed to be done. There were quite a few small things that needed fixing, like bookshelves, stairs, curtains, doorknobs, locks, leaking faucets, etc. In two weeks, I had a list of 242 things that needed to be done.

"Since then, I have filled my life with inspirational activities. I travel to New York City two nights a week for adult education classes and participate in some small town events. Now chair the school board. Also assist the Red Cross Fundraising for other organizations, I am too busy to worry about it now." There is no time to worry, which is what Churchill said when the war was so intense that he was working 18 hours a day.When someone asked him if he worried about such a heavy responsibility, he said, "I'm too slow, I don't have time to worry." The great scientist Buster once said: "In the library and the laboratory you can find peace." Because there, people are buried in their work and don't worry about themselves.People who do research rarely have a nervous breakdown because they don't have time for the luxury of worry.

Famed poet Henry Longfellow nearly went insane after his wife tragically died of burns.Fortunately, he has three young children in his care.As a father and mother, he took them for walks, told them stories, played with them, and immortalized their father-son relationship in the poem "Children's Time".He also translated Dante's Divine Comedy.The busyness brought him back his peace of mind.As Bennyson once said when his best friend Arthur Harlan died: "I must immerse myself in work, or I will be troubled by despair." When we are not busy, there is often a vacuum in our minds.At this time, emotions such as worry, fear, hatred, jealousy and envy will fill in and drive out the peaceful and happy elements in our thoughts.

For most people, "immersing themselves in work" probably won't be much of a problem when it comes to doing their day job and running around.But after get off work—when we are free to enjoy leisure and pleasure—the demons of worry begin to attack us.At this time, we often start to think about what achievements we have made in our lives, whether our work is on track, whether the words our boss said today have "special meaning", or whether our hair is starting to go bald... James Marcoll, a professor of education at Columbia Teachers College, put it well on this point: "Worry hurts you the most, not when you're doing something, but at the end of the day. This is when your imagination starts to clutter, making you exaggerate every little mistake. Your mind is like an unloaded car on a rampage, crashing everything until it smashes itself to pieces. The best way to eliminate worry A good way is to keep yourself busy doing anything meaningful."

I know an entrepreneur in New York who uses busyness to drive away those "wandering thoughts" so that he has no time to worry and worry.His name was Cubble Langman, and he was also in my adult education class.His experience of conquering worry is very interesting and very special.So, after class, I asked him to have supper with me, and we sat in a restaurant until late at night, talking about his experiences.Here is a story he told me: "Eighteen years ago, I was suffering from insomnia from worrying too much. I was so stressed out, short-tempered and unstable that I thought I was going to split.

"There's a reason I'm so concerned. I was the financial manager for Crown Fruit Products in New York. We invested half a million dollars and packaged strawberries in gallon jars. of strawberries were sold to manufacturers of ice cream. After a period of time, our sales plummeted. Those big ice cream manufacturers, like National Dairy, increased their production dramatically. In order to save money and time, and reduce costs, They both buy strawberries in 36 gallon buckets. "Not only can we not sell strawberries worth $500,000, but according to the contract, we must continue to buy strawberries worth $1 million in the next year. We have borrowed $350,000 from the bank, and now we can neither I can't pay off my debts, and I can't raise the money I need, so I'm very worried.

"I rushed to our plant in Watsonville, California, to let our general manager know that things had changed and that we might be doomed. But he wouldn't believe it, and took full responsibility for these problems. Blame it on New York corporations—the poor business people. "After a few days of pleading, I finally convinced him to stop packaging strawberries the old way and to sell the new product in San Francisco's fresh strawberry market. This would roughly solve most of our problems. Ordinarily I shouldn't have No more worrying, but I still can't do it. Worrying is a habit, and I've gotten into it.

"When I got back to New York, I started worrying about everything again. I was so nervous about the cherries I bought in Italy, the pineapples in Hawaii, etc. I couldn't sleep. Like I just said, I Almost on the verge of a nervous breakdown. "In desperation, I switched to a new way of life that cured my insomnia and stopped worrying. I kept myself as busy as possible, so busy that I had to give all my energy and time. I didn't Time to worry. I used to work 7 hours a day, now I'm working 15-16 hours a day. I get to the office at 8:00 every morning. I stay until midnight. I take on new tasks, new responsibilities When I get home in the middle of the night, I always fall on the bed exhausted and fall asleep soon.

"After about three months of this, I finally kicked the habit of worrying and went back to working seven to eight hour shifts a day. This happened 18 years ago and I haven't done it since. Insomnia and worry." George Bernard Shaw said it well when he said, "The secret of being miserable is to have spare time to think whether you are happy or not." So don't think about it.Keep yourself busy and your blood will start to circulate and your mind will start to sharpen.Keeping yourself busy is one of the cheapest medicines in the world, and it's also one of the best.