The Easy Way Out

“Time was when the Will to Effort was systematically cultivated in homes and schools, on farms, in stores and factories.  Mean and women were trained routinely to expect of life a great deal of effort and a small fraction only of comfort.  In the process, they developed a rugged disposition which means:  the Will to Bear Discomfort.  Unfortunately, the accent is today on comfort, on fun and entertainment, on making things easy and pleasant.

With the Will to Comfort scoring heavily over the Will to Effort, people are no longer prepared to endure strain and anxieties and suffering.  And when suffering strikes, especially the excruciating suffering of nervous ailments, they expect the cure to be effected with the proverbial ease of child’s play and perhaps in as brief a space of time as the average game may last.   This means plaing with the illness and converting the business of getting well into a game of trying to secure effortless comfort.”

from Mental Health Through Will-Training by Dr. Abraham A. Low

“Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living,” said a note Prado’s book.

from Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon.

Think before you speak. Even a seemingly innocent comment has the potential to cause great harm.

About Self-Help

“One who is incarcerated cannot free himself from jail” (Brachos 5b).

Train Tracks

Growing up in my town in the deep south during the sixties was a bit different than the rest of the country, or at least what I saw on TV.

Running east and west was the Southern Pacific Railway where every day at about four in the afternoon a freight train would run through town.  Then, later, closer to midnight, another echoed into the night as my brothers and I slept beside open windows on a hot summer night.

On the south side of the tracks, all the blacks lived.  On the north, the whites.  This was the order of things.

In a mainstreet cafe where many insurance agents, farmers, lawyers, car salesmen and a whole hodge podge of white men came to sip coffee from a quarter to seven till about eight, a sign on the wall a few feet from the long, green topped counter read:  “We reserve the right to serve whoever we want.”  Even as a boy, I wondered if they would ever refuse me a cup of coffee because little boys didn’t drink coffee with grown men.

Which, of course, brings me to the water fountain.  Blacks never drank from them.  They just didn’t.  My buddies and I often wondered what happened if they did.  Or, if we actually saw one drink from the fountain.  And which fountain, because the only ones I remember were at school, and school was closed for the summer.  Maybe down at the court house, but we never went down there. 

What I remember most was my father cussing at those “animals, damn animals” burning Cleveland one summer of which year I can’t remember.  He cursed them, demanding they be sent back to Africa.  I’m sure I didn’t know why.  All I figured was they, those black men in Cleveland, were lucky because my father’s anger would never reach out to them.  To me and my brothers, well, that was all together different. 

That was just the order of things.