many of us have listened over and
over to the same tale of past annoyances, until we wonder how it can
be possible that the constant repetition is not recognized by the
narrator! How many of us have been over and over in our minds past
troubles, little and big, so that we have no right whatever to feel
impatient when listening to such repetitions by others! Here again
we have, in nervous disease, the extreme of a common trait in
humanity. With increased nervous fatigue there is always an increase
of the tendency to repetition. Best drop it before it gets to the
fatigue stage, if possible.

Then again there are the common things of life, such as dressing and
undressing, and the numberless every-day duties. It is possible to
distort them to perfect monstrosities by the manner of dwelling upon
them. Taken as a matter of course, they are the very triviality of
trivialities, and assume their place without second thought.

When life seems to get into such a snarl that we despair of
disentangling it, a long journey and change of human surroundings
enable us to take a distant view, which not uncommonly shows the
tangle to be no tangle at all. Although we cannot always go upon a
material journey, we can change the mental perspective, and it is
this adjustment of the focus which brings our perspective into truer
proportions. Having once found what appears to be the true focus,
let us be true to it. The temptations to lose one's focus are many,
and sometimes severe. When temporarily thrown off our balance, the
best help is to return at once, without dwelling on the fact that we
have lost the focus longer than is necessary to find it again. After
that, our focus is better adjusted and the range steadily expanded.
It is impossible for us to widen the range by thinking about it;
holding the best focus we know in our daily experience does that
Thus the proportions arrange themselves; we cannot arrange the
proportions. Or, what is more nearly the truth, the proportions are
in reality true, to begin with. As with the imaginary eye-disease,
which transformed the relative sizes of the component parts of a
landscape, the fault is in the eye, not in the landscape; so, when
the circumstances of life are quite in the wrong proportion to one
another, in our own minds, the trouble is in the mental sight, not
in the circumstances.

There are many ways of getting a better focus, and ridding one's
self of trivial annoyances. One is, to be qui