you are engaged in the most important
of daily acts? What asinine boor can laugh at you?

I do not care what you concentrate on, so long as you concentrate. It
is the mere disciplining of the thinking machine that counts. But
still, you may as well kill two birds with one stone, and concentrate
on something useful. I suggest--it is only a suggestion--a little
chapter of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus.

Do not, I beg, shy at their names. For myself, I know nothing more
"actual," more bursting with plain common-sense, applicable to the
daily life of plain persons like you and me (who hate airs, pose, and
nonsense) than Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. Read a chapter--and so
short they are, the chapters!--in the evening and concentrate on it the
next morning. You will see.

Yes, my friend, it is useless for you to try to disguise the fact. I
can hear your brain like a telephone at my ear. You are saying to
yourself: "This fellow was doing pretty well up to his seventh
chapter. He had begun to interest me faintly. But what he says about
thinking in trains, and concentration, and so on, is not for me. It
may be well enough for some folks, but it isn't in my line."

It is for you, I passionately repeat; it is for you. Indeed, you are
the very man I am aiming at.

Throw away the suggestion, and you throw away the most precious
suggestion that was ever offered to you. It is not my suggestion. It
is the suggestion of the most sensible, practical, hard-headed men who
have walked the earth. I only give it you at second-hand. Try it. Get
your mind in hand. And see how the process cures half the evils of
life--especially worry, that miserable, avoidable, shameful
disease--worry!

VIII

THE REFLECTIVE MOOD

The exercise of concentrating the mind (to which at least half an hour
a day should be given) is a mere preliminary, like scales on the piano.
Having acquired power over that most unruly member of one's complex
organism, one has naturally to put it to the yoke. Useless to possess
an obedient mind unless one profits to the furthest possible degree by
its obedience. A prolonged primary course of study is indicated.

Now as to what this course of study should be there cannot be any
question; there never has been any question. All the sensible people
of all ages are agreed upon it. And it is not literature, nor is it
any other art, nor is it history, nor is it any science. It is the
study of one's self. M