How To Have Trouble Successfully

January 21, 1968
Plainfield

How To Have Trouble Successfully

Did you see the “Peanuts” cartoon, January 9th, when Snoopy in his Walter Mittyish role as the World War I flying ace is singing, “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile?” The last panel of the strip shows snoopy looking quite confused and depressed, saying, “How in the world am I going to get my troubles in a kit bag?” Haven’t you felt like that many times, perhaps even this week? Life can put us in a vise!

Some troubles are of our own making:

debts that outdistance our financial capacities;

telephone calls that we failed to make; tasks that we did not do, although we had the time but lacked the inclination;

little ways of wrong behavior that we permitted to become deeply rutted habits, discovering too late that climbing out of the rut was a Herculean labor and that we didn’t have the strength of Hercules;

our fears, anxieties and insecurities that block us from being thoroughly honest and open with others.

Some troubles happen, not of our making:

the wrong behavior or attitudes of someone else which cause difficulties for us which we cannot feel we were responsible;

the cultural inheritance and requirements in a society which present situations in which persons do not get equal treatment, do not receive a fair deal, although they deserve equal treatment and a fair deal;

Social structures that by their nature make us marginal, uncomfortable, not fitting in. We may possess serious doubts or utter cynicism about the social ways, the accepted values that the majority accept. If we are realistic, we become aware that it is painful and difficult to separate out from the social customs and political attitudes that most people accept without bother or difficulty. But possessing such awareness, the old and comfortable ways will not entirely do for us anymore. And when we are marginal in this sense, we are troubled by the pains and price of such separating out.

Then there are troubles for which neither ourselves, others, nor human society are to blame. An earthquake kills hundreds of persons, as in Sicily this week. A great storm at sea swamps a sturdy Dutch ship. A rockslide may crush out the lives of a camping party.

When one considers the variety of sources from which disturbances come, ourselves, others, and the mysterious feelings of the forces of the Universe, it should not be surprising that troubles in the personal and social order are constant companions of our ways of living in this world.

Furthermore, although the troubles of some persons are obvious to others, the troubles of many are not always recognized beneath the facades of outward controls, seeming happiness and apparent freedom from heavy burdens. But only the rare person is free from trouble. Many crosses that are shouldered are not seen. And a great many have asked themselves Hamlet’s question:

“To be or not to be, that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to — 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd....”

Job is the literary masterpiece of the Bible because it deals so matchlessly with man confronting trouble. In Job’s case, the suffering was undeserved, seemingly. But deserved or undeserved, the sufferings that occasionally or persistently touch the human condition can cause inner anxiety and upset. Persons torture themselves with the question, why? Why must I endure this trouble? Why did it happen to me? If God is good, he would not do this to me. Job cried out (3 20/26), “Why is light given to him that is in misery....”

Trouble can make us feel hedged in. Whether we believe that God has hedged us in, or whether we believe that troubles arise in an unfeeling Universe, a constellation of forces and causes impervious to the human condition; or whether we believe that the shorelines of knowledge will always be less than the oceans of mystery, trouble can hedge us in. The perpendicular dimension of life (hope, progress, fulfillment) becomes crossed with the horizontal slash of pessimism, regression, and frustration.

The unexplainable illness, why? The strange accident, why? The disastrous turn of events, why? We look for life to go along evenly and then trouble tilts the expectations.

Automobiles break down, sometimes when we have maintained proper care. Cancer happens even when we’ve had those regular check-ups. The market goes down when we were sure it was going up. The sons and daughters develop severe problems in spite of efforts of parents to provide love and proper nurture. Why?

As Snoopy said, how are all these problems to fit in the old kitbag? How can we handle trouble successfully? What do we do when life crosses us up? That famous 19th century Unitarian minister and orator, Edward Everett Hale had a sentence deserving a place on the kitchen bulletin board or corner of the desk pad: “Never bear more than one trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds: all they have ever had, all they have now, and all they expect to have.”

Some people bear all the trouble they ever had. Every mistake they made or all the ill fortune they ever met remain heavy burdens they can carry. on the whole our past mistakes and bad luck should be foundations of learning whereby we become more competent masters of present experience.

We need the past. Destroy the memory bank and we are no longer persons. Yet one of the benefits provided by various psychological therapies is the marvelous insight that we need to know our past, not for the purposes of blame and guilt, but for self-understanding. Just as a fair-minded person condemns others less as he understands them more, so a person will not torture himself with needless guilt when he has confronted his past openly and candidly, seeking clarification of feelings that have been clouded.

There are things we can do about troubles that are past; right an old wrong, take a new direction, look upon the unpleasant past as a learning experience. But simply to be burdened down by mistakes that are past is a failing way to handle troubles.

Omar Khayyam was wise to remind us that the moving finger writes and having writ, moves on and all our tears will not wash out a word.

We fail to handle troubles successfully if we try to bear all the troubles we expect to have. Some people are hypochondriacs, neurotically obsessed with interpreting every twinge, blush, and itch as the signal for some inescapable, loathsome, or fatal disease. And my uninformed guess is that such morbid diagnoses are as thoroughly in error as the consequence that the feelings create anxieties that need not be.

Some persons shake with dread and anxiously face the floor when daughter, son, fiancé, husband, or wife are five minutes late or fail to call. Terrible possibilities capture feelings – death, accident, misadventure. These crowd out normal thoughts and halt usual activities. Have you heard such fears expressed as, “I just know something has happened to him.” Have you ever known the pain of such apprehensions?

Others fear the future of the nation with fearsome forebodings. War will wipe everything out; pollution will strangle the city-dwellers; criminals in the streets will bring in a rule of mayhem, assault, robbery, and terror.

For most of us, the future is veiled. There may be rare persons whose hunches prove to be true more often than mere chance would provide. Jean[e] Dixon is not so easily explained away as most people assume. In ways generally misunderstood, or now unknown there may be such a phenomenon as fore-knowledge.

Certainly we must plan for the future. When John Gunther was in the Soviet Union collecting material for his book, INSIDE RUSSIA, he saw a road marker on the outskirts of Smolensk. One side bore these words, “Napoleon with 400,000 men marched through here on the way to Moscow.” The other side of the sign, facing West, had the inscription, “Napoleon with 9,000 men marched through here on the way back from Moscow.”

If Napoleon had made more reasonable, informed plans and had had fewer delusions of grandeur, he might have decided to avoid that disastrous military adventure. Of course planning is necessary. Unless peace is planned for, war will put an end to us all. Unless pollution controls for water and air are strengthened and maintained, we may be poisoned by poorly controlled wastes. Of course we must plan to come to grips more strongly with the causes as well as the control of law breakers.

But when we have done our best to plan, whether for our individual hopes or national and international goals, we should let the troubles of the future await the future.

My experience is that most of my worries about future troubles were misdirected. The troubles I feared never came about; the troubles which cam I had never really anticipated. After all, if worry about future troubles provided some true information about the future, one could get rich worrying about the stock market, for example, knowing when that decline was going to occur. So, in my more normal moments, I’m going to worry was little as possible about the things I know nothing about and therefore can do nothing about.

One can handle future troubles successfully by planning as best one can, anticipating as many obstacles in the way of one’s dreams as can be foreseen – but then refusing to be burdened by troubles unknown and still to come. One of the most comforting aspects of the future is that it is going to unfold one minute, one hour, one day at a time. As Jesus reminded his audience (Matt 6/27), “And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to the span of his life?” Or as a homely Dutch proverb has it, “When I go to bed I leave my troubles in my clothes.”

But what about troubles in the very real present? As Edward Everett Hale said, we cannot bear well three kinds of trouble, past, future, and present. If we can place past troubles and future troubles in perspective, we have a better opportunity to have trouble successfully in the present.

Now nothing is more aggravating when trouble is authentic and present than to have someone assure us that it is only imaginary. In my view only a special kind of person can stand the shallow “Pollyanna” types. I react with some resentment when someone slaps me on the back and says, “Buck up old boy, everything’s going to be all right,” when the facts are formidably persuasive that everything’s not going to be all right.

One cannot have trouble successfully by refusing to face it. If you are somewhere near my age, you may recall a particularly inferior song of 30 years ago, or so,

“Let’s take a trip to Niagara
Let’s go and visit the Falls
Let’s take a powder to Boston for chowder
Let’s get away from it all.”

We do need vacations, of course, not to escape from reality but to be strengthened by rest and change to face troubles boldly and honestly. Among the poorer ways of living is to run away from present troubles. Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote,

“If I had a formula for by-passing trouble, I wouldn’t pass it around. Wouldn’t be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don’t say embrace trouble. That’s as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you’ll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.”

The emotional pains and the physical upsets are signals from our inner self warning us to deal with present troubles. The self is seeking to overcome. We grow more in real wisdom and stature if we take hints, face our troubles, accept and try to understand the pain and grow by seeking truer knowledge and a better way.

There’s an analogy in the Christian scripture of Luke (19/1 ff). As the old legend goes, when Jesus was passing through Jericho, Zaccheus, described as a rich tax collector, was a little man and could not see Jesus because of the crowds. So Zaccheus climbed a tree. Not only did he see the man acclaimed as the Messiah, but Jesus saw him. They became friends and Jesus was a guest at Zaccheus’ house. Now varieties of theological interpretation are attached to this charming anecdote. The point made by Christian theologians is, I guess, that rich tax collectors are by nature among the sinners for whom redemption is most unlikely, but that even they can be saved. Well, maybe there is some enduring truth to the temptations of tax collecting, judging by the Internal Revenue scandal this week in New York, but I like Zaccheus. He’s the kind of guy who though short, climbed a tree when he couldn’t see.

That is one of the better ways to handle trouble successfully – do something about it. Sometimes we need help. If the lowest branch was rather high, maybe someone had to give Zaccheus a boost. We need help in trouble some times; many times we can climb for ourselves. Unconfronted trouble is always more dreadful than the trouble we have met head-on.

In conclusion, let me suggest that we handle trouble successfully not only in the ways suggested, but also remembering always that life is worth loving. There are times when this seems not to be so, as Hamlet and Job expressed for us. But when we come to ourselves, when we are at our best, we know that life is worth loving, and therefore worth living.

Such a point of view allows a sympathetic interpretation of words from a speech of Eliphaz, one of the contenders with Job:

“For affliction does not come from the dust,
nor does trouble sprout from the ground;
but man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards.”

Or perhaps the Promethean myth suggests the human condition more sensitively – Man stole fire from the gods – and was provided not only with the means of warmth and light, but also with the danger of being burned.

Because man is a self with feeling, able to focus thought on his experiences, he cannot avoid consciousness of troubles. Sparks fly upwards and the human condition is to be aware. When one is aware, then human experience provides trouble as well as benefit, sorrow as well as joy, difficulty as well as ease, irritation as well as comfort. These are experiences to most, to wrestle with and out of such arduous confrontation to emerge more fully grown in the direction of the fulfilled selves each of us may one day be.