How to Face Life
9781465635686
108 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
How to face life, how to prepare for life, are questions that must be answered by those who believe, as Lecky put it, that the “map of life” must be marked out, that in the words of Emerson there is such a thing as the “conduct of life” which man is free to determine. We are assured incessantly in these days that we must enter upon a great programme of preparedness for war,—back of which urging lies the assumption that a maximum of preparedness must be arranged in order to secure our land against the menace of aggression or invasion. If a programme of preparedness, which in the last analysis involves destruction and desolation, be impossible without the fullest planning, how much less possible is it to shape a constructive life-upbuilding programme without most careful and adequate preparedness. Into the mind of youth must penetrate the ideal of self-preparedness,—not of external preparation for the outward life, but of inmost preparedness for the inner life. Whether or not the preparedness programme be, as some hold, more menacing to the soul of America than foreign foe can ever become because it marks an immediate invasion of the American soul rather than a possible aggression upon American soil, it is certain that life cannot worthily be lived save after preparedness in the fullest sense of the term. It is, in truth, easy to stir up excitement and even deeper feeling over a purely external problem such as is that of war-preparedness, preparing to do something to another whether an individual or a nation or a continent. The easiest way is the way of external preparedness, the militaristic way, for it involves a minimum of reasoning. But preparation for life which I ask of youth involves the largest measure of reasoning and planning and purposing. It is the hardest way rather than the easiest way, though the pursuit thereof makes ultimately for the way that is inevitably rightful and unerring. Is it needful to urge upon young people that they shall face life with the determination to sketch for themselves a map of life as they see it, as they purpose, if so be they purpose, to make it? What would be said of a military commander who entered upon a land to him unknown without securing in advance the fullest possible data, without gaining, as far as it was possible so to do, an understanding of the outlines of the country he proposed to enter? Curiously enough, it is often imagined that preparation for life is largely a matter of the higher education and exclusively associated with college and university life. This imagining may be due to the circumstance that men and women step out of so-called preparatory schools into higher institutions of learning. One sometimes wonders, in very truth, whether, instead of college preparing men for life, it were not more fitting to hold that after the college or university experience men need to be repaired if they are rightly to live and toil and serve. My counsel is not for men alone but for men and women, for youth and maidens alike. Let no man venture to offer two kinds of counsel, one to men and yet another to women. There is only one manner of preparedness for life, for life is life and it is not one thing for a man and yet another for a woman. Though I have used the term “map of life,” map is hardly a happy analogy. For maps presuppose that a land is become known and familiar. And life cannot be foreknown and charted, if life it is to be, as every life ought to be, a great adventure into the unknown rather than the acceptance of a programme, a hazard of the spirit rather than a body of prescriptions and ordinances. We are to fare forth upon the seas of life,—without chart.
