The Art of Helping People Out of Trouble/Chapter 1
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My cook wears a smiling, healthy, rather pleasing face. He is a good-looking young man. . . . One day I looked through a little hole in the shoji, and saw him alone. The face was not the same face. It was thin and drawn and showed queer lines worn by old hardship. . . . I went in, and the man was all changed—young and happy again. . . . He wears the mask of happiness as an etiquette. (The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn.)
Living has yet to be generally recognized as one of the arts. Being born and growing up are such common experiences that people seldom consider what they involve. As most readers of books pass from cover to cover, realizing not at all that the letters which form the words are the product of painstaking craftsmanship and that the imposition of the type upon the page, the composition of the title-piece, the binding of the volume, are the result of centuries of study and design, so also we take as a matter of course the miracle of being alive, and the comings and goings of the men and women about us.
No matter how close our neighbors, no matter how intimate our friends, we rarely appreciate the effort by which they achieve a mastery of life. This is a thing that they keep to themselves. Except in such moments of self-revelation as that in which Lafcadio Hearn found his Japanese cook, human beings truly wear the mask of happiness as an etiquette; since all the while they are engaged in a constant and relentless struggle.
For man is not born into a world made to fit him like a custom tailored suit of clothes, or a house built to order. He enters a universe that was eons old before his appearance, and that in all likelihood will continue for eons after his departure, an infinitely complex, eternally changing universe that evolves its processes unmindful of his presence. It sets the conditions. It is man who must do the fitting.
The task engrosses his every moment. He must adjust himself to the changeless laws of nature. He must adapt himself to the men and things about him. His very life at birth depends upon his ability in an instant to oxygenate his blood from the outside air instead of through the circulatory system of the mother. Within a very few hours he must learn the process of digestion. As he grows older, he must accustom himself to variations in temperature, to the passage of the seasons, to the peculiarities of his physical environment. He must develop immunity from the swarm of bacterial parasites. Failure in many of these things may mean an end to his existence; yet they are the least perplexing adjustments he must make. For mostly they are automatic. In a sense they are beyond his conscious control. It is rather the adjustments to people and to events that involve the most vivid struggle. It is these which make the greatest demands upon his character and ability, and they throng every minute of every day.
His waking must be determined, not by the sun, but by the demands of his occupation. The time of breakfast and the food upon the table are the result of adjustment to the convenience and tastes of the different members of the household. His clothes must suit the weather and the day's engagements. He must adapt himself to train schedules, traffic regulations, library rules. He must compromise between his income and his needs and desires. Adaptations must be made to the house and to the neighborhood in which he lives, to manners and customs, to the organization of business, to the city, to the country, to accidents, to old age, to birth, to death.
Man is like a canoeist directing his course through waves. One after another he meets them. They may be heavy and powerful or they may be light ruffles of a sunshiny day in midsummer. He must ride them all. To each one he must slant his craft, dipping his paddle at just the right moment, giving it just the right twist, putting just the right amount of force into the stroke. Each wave requires a decision. Let him fail in judgment, or in skill and strength, and his canoe may ship water until it fills, or, in the lift of some great breaker, overturn immediately.
And as upon the ocean, a wave occasionally approaches which overtops its fellows, so, too, in life there towers before the voyager not infrequently a 'ninth born son of the hurricane and the tide.' These waves call forth all the skill that the mariner possesses. He who rides them may well count himself a master of the sea, for while the lesser adaptations of life cause many a wreck, it is these which occasion the greatest disasters. Would one learn to appreciate the art of living, he need but observe the manner in which people meet these portentous relationships and events.
Such are the adjustments to adolescence, to independence, to marriage, to single life, to widowhood, to a marked change in income, to sickness, to physical handicaps, to work, to parenthood, to disappointment in love, to the first visit away from home, to school, to college, to divorce, to home after the children have grown up and left it. Life is full of other similar situations. Not all of them are met by everybody, and people who have been confronted by the same problem find that to each individual it has presented itself in a different aspect. Yet one need study only a few of these experiences to realize that underlying all is the fundamental question of adjustment.
During adolescence there is the adjustment that accompanies the awakening of the child to the world outside the home. Hitherto the mother has been the refuge of sympathy and understanding, the father the source of recreation and adventure, and both the final authority upon questions of taste, of information, and of right and wrong. The boy—and in this he usually anticipates the experience of his sister—now discovers a kinship with those of his own age and develops an increasing respect for their standards of life and conduct. He becomes impatient of parental 'mays' and 'may nots,' all the more so because with the burgeoning of a new physique he is conscious of aspirations and emotions that he thinks the apparently staid and settled middle years cannot appreciate. He demands emancipation. He wants to be himself.
This spiritual emergence from the confines of the home does not often occur in a girl until she goes to work or to college. It then becomes a struggle for independence. Up to this time her goings and comings have been more closely supervised than those of her brother. In many households she is more her mother's daughter than she is herself. And now a greater freedom is opened to her. Going to work gives her the power of earned money and the broadened horizon of new companions. Going away to college brings her new associates and removes her from the immediate oversight of her parents. The result of either experience is to face her and her parents with much the same adjustment that her brother met in adolescence. The children seek self-expression and a larger control over themselves. The parents, regarding them still as children, want to continue to protect and direct them. Therein lies the possibility of conflict and the difficulty of the adjustment. If the parents draw the bonds of authority closer, if they place walls about the home, youth rebels, sometimes to yield to sullenness or to an irritable discontent, sometimes to break away from the life of the family altogether and to replace it with unstable and unsatisfactory friendships. If, however, mother and father recognize the right of the children to their own lives, the reason for conflict will disappear. Best of all is that attitude of the parents toward both daughter and son which fosters a gradual unfolding and increasing of the girl's and the boy's responsibility, so that this phase of the adjustment to adolescence and independence never becomes critical or even conscious, but takes place as part of the evolution from childhood to youth and from youth to adult life.
The adjustment to marriage involves an institution that, ever changing, is yet ever the same. It varies as human beings vary. In the homes of neighbors it may exist in the tradition of one hundred years ago and as a prophecy of what it may be to-morrow.
The twentieth century finds it a more democratic and a more spiritual relationship than ever it has been before. Man is now an integral part of the family in contrast to the days when he was lord and the woman subject. Then he was in a sense superior to the family and outside of its laws. For spiritual and intellectual companionship he looked to other men, and both before and in marriage, society condoned in him a standard of sex morality different from that which it demanded of his wife.
To-day, woman, with vastly increased opportunity for education and with an extension of interest to all human activities, offers to man a relationship that is rich in its intellectual and spiritual possibilities. She is capable of a fineness and delicacy of appreciation that challenges his understanding, while the single standard of sex morality causes the physical basis of marriage to be of increasing significance.
Even the appearance of the home has become a factor in determining the success of the association of husband and wife. The business of financing and administering the household calls forth ever greater ability and the growing appreciation of the psychology of childhood has added to the importance of the family as an educational institution.
Marriage is the most complicated of all adjustments, for the man and the woman must adapt themselves, not only to a new task and a new environment, but they must determine the form of that task and the character of that environment, and they must do this, not each for himself, but together. Two individualities, two sets of likes and dislikes, and of manners and mannerisms, two sexes, two products of different inheritance and experience, must combine to give expression to a new entity, the family. It is the most intimate of all relationships. In it there is no such thing as the impersonality which simplifies association with human beings in other situations. Always there is the intangible emotional factor, capable of thwarting every attempt at adjustment or of making easy the adaptation of personalities whose union would otherwise be impossible. Analyze it though one may, marriage will continue to escape definition. It will be discussed and debated through the coming generations as it has been through the past, and yet will ever hold the quality of mystery, offering to its votaries an enduring source of happiness.
As the adjustment to marriage is not accomplished in a day, but must be made as long as the man and the woman continue to be husband and wife, so also the adjustment to single life is a process of years. With a woman it begins usually midway between twenty and thirty. She is then mature, but not so settled that adjustment to another personality would be difficult. She is physically best equipped for the bearing of children. She has completed her formal education. If she has been at work, she has served her apprenticeship. All that has gone before has been a preparation. Nature and custom define marriage and motherhood as the next step. But the same intangible factor which can make or mar marriage cuts across her path. She does not meet the man with whom she would mate.
This is not a decision that can be made finally. The possibility of marriage affects her plans for ten or fifteen years, or even longer. If, as now most single women do, she turns toward a career, she is not likely to make the same whole-hearted adjustment to it as that of which a man is capable. Uncertainty about the future renders it difficult for her to be constant in work.
Unless she finds opportunity for achievement in civic activities, or in business, she may develop a feeling of ineffectiveness because of what she may consider to be her failure to marry. She may think that there is a questioning in the minds of her friends, and in so thinking she may become supersensitive in her relations with other people.
Far more serious and more difficult of adjustment than either the feeling of uncertainty or that of ineffectiveness is the lack of an emotional outlet. That part of the single woman's nature which in marriage would be directed toward lover, husband, and child has not this trinity of the affections. In its place she must find a medium for expression. The quality of her relationship with her parents and the other members of the family becomes therefore of greater importance to her than to her married sister. This is true of all her friendships, particularly of her friendships with women. As she grows older, she probably finds her association with men increasingly casual and infrequent. She must replace this with other interests, taking care to avoid the dangers of an ingrowing existence that expresses itself in a frigidity in personal relationships or in a parasitic emotion for some other woman.
To chart a straight course through the shoals and reefs of single life, to attain to the happiness of dignified and affectionate friendships, to keep a sense of proportion and balance, to maintain a tolerance of temperament and attitude is truly an achievement. Yet women are making this adjustment, developing in the process richer personalities, and sounding new depths of understanding and appreciation.
The single man usually is close to thirty years before his thoughts are affected by the fact that he is not married. With him marriage is not a career as with woman. It is rather a motive for a career. Lacking this, he must combat a feeling of futility. He has no one for whom to labor. The tendency in the single woman toward instability in work becomes with him an instability in his manner of living. He has no sense of permanence in abode or in his social relations. Helping still further to unsettle him is the solicitude of his friends. He is never allowed to forget that he ought to be married. There is always the implication of a responsibility shirked.
The instinct to parenthood is generally not so dynamic a force in him as in woman. It rarely develops until after he becomes a father, but there is a compensating instinct to protect. Frequently this transfers itself into loyalty and devotion to his mother, who may, particularly if she is a widow, consciously or unconsciously, play upon this instinct, preventing both his marriage and the free development of his career.
In making the adjustment to single life, the man must guard both against a devotion of this kind which hinders him from attaining to a true self-expression, and against a self-centered existence that at the worst may drift into sensuality. At the best he may, in adjusting himself to single life, achieve an intense application to work and a variety of interests and friendships that can bring him a large measure of happiness.
Widowhood, like all other adjustments, presents itself under a multitude of varying circumstances. The widowhood which follows a happy marriage is primarily the adjustment to a great loneliness, a loneliness that is both spiritual and physical. Life has hitherto been arranged on a communal basis; the family instead of the individual has been the unit, every responsibility has been shared, the habit of intimate association with another person has been formed. Now this is all changed. Some people attempt to fill the empty place by summoning memories of the past and idealizing the one who has gone, a form of substitution which if indulged too greatly may degenerate into self-pity and a withdrawal from wholesome activity. Far wiser is it to rely upon work and other interests, inside the home or without, in which variety and inspiration can play their part.
Children both simplify and complicate the adjustment. They provide an outlet for the affections, but they offer the temptation to emotional dependence. Some parents become almost parasitic in this respect, handicapping the children in their efforts at self-expression and preventing them from the freedom which their development requires. Even where this does not happen, the problem of training and of education is most difficult. The mother must be both father and mother. Hitherto, the children have had the benefit of the thought and experience of two people. Widowhood involves a loss which the mother cannot make up by duplicating herself through the devotion of more time and energy. She must seek other contacts and other associates for her children to compensate them for what their father would have contributed.
When it is the father who has been left, the problem becomes still more perplexing. Only too often in the absence of the mother the family breaks. She has been the home, and without her the whole structure collapses, leaving the husband to make a new adjustment to single life, and the children to face the whole series of difficulties which confronts those who are homeless and orphaned.
Sickness involves a twofold adjustment, the adjustment which the patient must make to his disease and that which his family and his friends must make to him. In either case the crux of the problem is much the same. What is he able to do and what is he unable to do? What exertion is wise and what is not wise? When should he yield to invalidism and when should he refuse to listen to the suggestion of ill-health? When should he reconcile himself to a continuance of nursing and when should he resume activity? When should his friends take care of him and when should they expect him to take care of himself? It is a problem that the diagnosis of the physician cannot always solve, for it has as much to do with the spirit as with the body. Often, the commiseration of friends and their desire to pamper is a more insidious foe for the patient to overcome than the bacteria of his disease.
Sometimes sickness affects the attitude and expression of the invalid so that he becomes a different person from what he would wish to be. Then all that experience, insight, and understanding can provide are required by his friends so that they can appreciate the reasons for his otherwise inexplicable behavior, and make the necessary allowances for it. This is particularly true when the man is not confined to his bed, but is suffering one of the minor and less apparent chronic illnesses. Wherever sickness appears, it brings new and unforeseen problems. There are few things that more quickly precipitate the true character of an individual and his friends.
Work is one of the most important of adjustments because it is chief among the mediums through which a man expresses his personality. Let Colas Breugnon describe it:
"There is one old chum that never goes back on me, my other self, my friend—my work. How good it is to stand before the bench with a tool in my hand and then saw and cut, plane, shave, carve, put in a peg, file, twist and turn the strong fine stuff, which resists yet yields—soft smooth walnut, as soft to my fingers as fairy flesh; the rosy bodies or brown limbs of our wood-nymphs which the hatchet has stripped of their robe. There is no pleasure like the accurate hand, the clever big fingers which can turn out the most fragile works of art, no pleasure like the thought which rules over the forces of the world, and writes the ordered caprices of its rich imagination on wood, iron, and stone. . . . To serve my art the elves of the sap push out the fair limbs of the trees, lengthen and fatten them until they are polished fit for my caresses. My hands are docile workmen, directed by their foreman, my old brain here, and he plays the game as I like it, for is he not my servant too? Was ever man better served than I?"
Here was a well-adjusted workman. He had what every one needs: an employment in which his faculties had the freest possible play. Happy is that person who finds this in his pursuit of a livelihood. A man cannot expend too great pains in the search for appropriate employment. Sometimes it is a quest of years, involving many trials. The more encouragement, therefore, should we offer the youth who, after leaving school or college, experiments with a number of different occupations. Instead of being reminded of the dismal proverb about the rolling stone, he should be received with sympathy and with interest and should be helped to discover the best channel for self-expression and service.
Sometimes this means creating in his present employment the desired opportunity. Imagination and invention can often delve into their own environment and find the seeds of growth. There are, however, many jobs that are so mechanical, so limited in scope, and so monotonous in the activities which they require, that there is little hope for self-expression in them. Those who earn their living in such ways, if they cannot change their work, should seek place for the play of their faculties in an avocation. There are many examples of this. Hawthorne's interest was writing, but he supported himself for years by a clerkship in a customs house. A man may be an operative in a factory and yet may make the art of photography his work, and not infrequently an inspired evangelist is concealed within the overalls of a janitor or behind the leathern apron of a cobbler.
Self-expression in work includes more than the achievement of brain and hand. It is dependent also upon the quality of the association that the individual has with his fellows. The office and the shop stand next to the home in the adaptability that they require of people. They are the very crossroads of life where personalities meet and pass and where there are multitudes of human contacts.
Truly the adjustment to work is enough alone to call forth all the skill that a man possesses. What renders it and every other adjustment vastly more difficult is the presence at the same time of other problems. It is not possible for him to concentrate upon work to the exclusion of everything else; for while he is making this adaptation he may also be confronted with the adjustment to illness or with the necessity of helping his son to meet the problems of adolescence. The adjustment to widowhood may be accompanied by a sudden change in income. The adaptations to single life and to unemployment may appear together. The adjustment to marriage may include the adjustment to parenthood.
Rarely do adjustments come alone and rarely do they concern only one person. Usually a number of people are affected. In marriage, man and woman and the relatives of both may be involved: in independence, the woman and her family; in work, employer and employee; in sickness, the invalid and the household.
The problem is always complex, and it is universal. All about us the struggle is going on, and in it human beings everywhere are engaged; silently, perhaps, and with countenances as cheerful as that of Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese cook, but none the less intently. Event succeeds event; accidents, people, happenings, one after another come toward us. Each must be met and dealt with, and upon the manner of our dealing depends the issue of our lives. If successful, men say that we are happy. If unsuccessful, they say we are in trouble. For this process of adjustment is life, and the mastery of it is the art of living which, who that considers the stakes, will deny to be the greatest of all the arts.