--- title: Improvement Era description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930. authors: - Jordan, William George collections: - periodicals tags: - magazine - improvement-era periodical: Improvement Era volume: 12 number: 3 published: 1909-01 publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations publisher_place: Salt Lake City language: en type: magazine reference: 'Jordan, William George, "Self-Control—VIII: Syndicating Our Sorrows," *Improvement Era* 12, no. 3 (January 1909): 213–216.' source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera1203unse transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers. identifier: improvementera1203unse start_page: 213 end_page: 216 rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1909-01) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera1203unse publication_year: 1909 note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1909, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # Self-Control—VIII: Syndicating Our Sorrows SELF-CONTROL.* •BY WILLIAM GEORGE JORDAN. VIII.— SYNDICATING OUR SORROWS. The most selfish man in the world is the one who is most unselfish,—with his sorrows. He does not leave a single misery of his untold to you, or unsuffered by you,— he gives you all of them. The world becomes to him a syndicate formed to take stock in his private cares, worries and trials. His mistake is in forming a syndicate; he should organize a trust and control it all himself, then he could keep every one from getting any of his misery. Life is a great, serious problem for the individual. All our greatest joys and our deepest sorrows come to us, — alone. We must go into our Gethsemane, — alone. We must battle against the mighty weakness within us, — alone. We must live our own life, — alone. We must die, — alone. We must accept the full resposibility of our life, — alone. If each one of us has this mighty problem of life to solve for himself, if each of us has his own cares, responsibilities, failures, doubts, fears, bereavements, we surely are playing a coward's part when we syndicate our sorrows to others. We should seek to make life brighter for others; we should seek to hearten them in their trials by the example of our courage in bearing our sorrows. We should seek to forget our failures, and remember only the new wisdom they gave us; we should live down our griefs by counting the joys and privileges still left to us; *From Self- Control; its Kingship and Majesty. Copyright 1889 and 1905 by Fleming H. Revell Company. 214 IMPRO VEMENT ERA . put behind us our worries and regrets, and face each new day of life as bravely as we can. But we have no right to retail our sorrow and unhappiness through the community. Autobiography constitutes a large part of the conversation of some people. It is not really conversation ,«*-it is an uninterrupted monologue. These people study their individual lives with a microscope, and then thej throw an enlarged view of their miseries on a screen and lecture on them, as a stereopticon man discourses on the microbes in a drop of water. They tell you that "they did not sleep a wink all night; they heard the clock strike every quarter of an hour." Now, there is no real cause for thus boasting of insomnia. It requires no peculiar talent, — even though it does come only to wide-awake people. If you ask such a man how he is feeling, he will trace the whole genealogy of his present condition down from the time he had the grippe four years ago. You hoped for a word; he gives you a treatise. You asked for a sentence; he delivers an encyclopedia. His motto is: ' 'Every man his own Boswell." He is syndicating his sorrows. The woman who makes her trials with her children, her troubles with her servants, her difficulties with her family, the subjects of conversation with her callers, is syndicating her sorrows. If she has a dear little innocent child who recites ' 'Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night," is it not wiser for the mother to bear it calmly and discreetly and in silence, than to syndicate this sorrow? The business man who lets his dyspepsia get into his disposition, and who makes every one round him suffer because he himself (ill, is syndicating ill-health. We have no right to make others the victims of our moods. If illness makes us cross and irritable, makes us unjust to faithful workers who cannot protest, let us quarantine ourselves so that we do not spread the contagion. Let us force ourselves to speak slowly, to keep anger away from the eyes, to prevent temper showing in the voice. If we feel that we must have dyspepsia, let us keep it out of our head, let us keep it from getting north of the neck. Most people sympathize too much with themselves. They take themselves as a single sentence isolated from the great text of life. They study themselves too much as separated from the rest SELF-CONTROL. 215 •of humanity, instead of being vitally connected with their fellowmen. There are some people who surrender to sorrow as others give way to dissipation. There is a vain pride of sorrow as well as of beauty. Most individuals have a strange glow of vanity in looking back upon their past and feeling that few others in life have suffered such trials, hardships and disappointments as have come to them. When Death comes into the little circle of loved ones who make up our world, all life becomes dark to us. We seem to have no reason for existing, no object, no incentive, no hope. The love that made struggle and effort bearable for us, — is gone. We stare, dry-eyed, in the future, and see no future; we want none. Life has become to us a past, — with no future. It is but a memory, without a hope. Then in the divine mystery of Nature's processes, under the tender, soothing touch of Time, as days melt into weeks,we begin to open our eyes gently to the world around us, and the noise and tumult of life jars less and less upon us. We have become emotionally convalescent. As the days go on, in our deep love, in the fulness of our loyalty, we protest often, with tears in our eyes, against our gradual return to the spirit and atmosphere of the days of the past. We feel in a subtle way a new pain, as if we were disloyal to the dear one, as if we were faithless to our love. Nature sweetly turns aside our protesting hands, and says to us, "There is no disloyalty in permitting the wounds to lessen their pain, to heal gradually, if Time foreordain that they can heal." There are some natures, all-absorbed in a mig hty love, wherein no healing is possible, — but these are rare souls in life. Bitter though our anguish be, we have no right to syndicate our sorrow. We have no right to cast a gloom over happy natures by our heavy weight of crape, by serving the term prescribed by Society for wearing the livery of mourning, — as if real grief thought of a uniform. We have no right to syndicate our grief by using note-paper with a heavy black border as wide as a hatband, thus parading our personal sorrow to others in their happiest moments. If life has not gone well with us, if fortune has left us disconsolate, if love has grown cold, and we sit alone by the embers; 216 1MPR0 VEMENT ERA . if life has become to us a valley of desolation, through which weary limbs must drag an unwilling body till the end shall come, — let us not radiate such an atmosphere to those round us; let us not take strangers through the catacombs of our life, and show the bones of our dead past; let us not pass our cup of sorrow to others, but. if we must drink it, let us take it as Socrates did his poison hemlock,— grandly, heroically and uncomplainingly. If your life has led you to doubt the existence of honor in man and virtue in woman; if you feel that religion is a pretense, that spirituality is a sham, that life is a failure, and death the entrance to nothingness; if you have absorbed all the poison philosophy of the world's pessimists, and committed the folly of believing it, — don't syndicate it. If your fellow-man be clinging to one frail spar, the last remnant of a noble, shipwrecked faith in God and humanity, let him keep it. Do not loosen his fingers from his hope, and tell him it is a delusion. How do you know? Who told you it was so? If these high-tide moments of life sweep your faith in Omnipotence into nothingness; if the friend in whom you have put all faith in humanity and humanity's God betray you, do not eagerly accept the teachings of those modern freethinkers who syndicate their infidelity at so much per reserved seat. Seek to recover your lost faith by listening to the million voices that speak of infinite wisdom, infinite love, that manifest themselves in nature and humanity, and then build up as rapidly as you can a new faith, a faith in something higher, better and truer than you have known before. You may have one in the world to whom ycu may dare show with the fulness of absolute confidence and perfect faith any thought, any hope, any sorrow, — but you dare not trust them to the world. Do not show the world through your Bluebeard chamber; keep your trials and sorrows as close to you as you can till you have mastered them. Don't weaken others by thus — syndicating your miseries. [to be continued]