CHAPTER 11

MAKING LOVE A HABIT OF THOUGHT

MAN'S law of being is Love.

To love is joy. To love always, under all conditions, is eternal life. To refuse to love is to turn the current of life back upon one's self. Result, stagnation, fermentation, death. We call such a one "selfish," and we don't feel like loving him. But we must if we would have eternal life, eternal joy.

How to love the unlovable is a conundrum. But even a conundrum has a solution. Would you like to know how I solved it? When I discovered that the law of life is love I tried mightily to feel love for all people and things. I succeeded beautifully with the heathen over in China. But I couldn't apply it to the vegetable Chinaman and the junk man. I could feel an ocean of love for sinners I never saw, but when Mrs. Blank told Mrs. Talker (and she told me) that she did wish I would select my hats in better taste, I found it impossible to feel any love for Mrs. Blank. I could walk along the street and feel a real thrill of loving pity for every little homeless cur, but when one trotted with four muddy paws up my newly scrubbed front steps I felt a lot more like clubbing him than loving him. And I couldn't fool myself into thinking I wanted to club him because I loved him — as I have heard of parents doing with their children. I could go about some kinds of housework in a perfect transfiguration of love; but when I had to clean lamps or the cook stove after the jelly boiled over, I dropped from the seventh heaven with a thud. Oh, dear, what was I to do?

I gave up trying to feel love and went to thinking love. I said, "I CHOOSE to love, whether I feel like it or not. I WILL send out love to everything and everybody, no matter how I feel. I WILL to love. I DO love." I "treated" myself for love in this way every time I was reminded of it. I thought it silently. I said it aloud in the privacy of my own room. I went up into the attic and stamped my foot and clenched my fist and hollered it! And I succeeded.

Let me whisper something to you: That is the only way to succeed in anything. Of course the virtue is not in the room or the attic or the "hollering," but in the activity of will induced by it. Try it. I succeeded in making love a habit of thought. When anything becomes a habit of thought it is registered in the ninety-five per cent sub-mind and then we say of it, "I feel." Affirm, affirm, AFFIRM — whisper — louder — HOLLER! Stamp your foot and hit out from the shoulder! Success must be conquered — not implored. She isn't a bird that can be caught with a little salt on her tail.

And while I am on this subject, let me tell you what Dr. Orison Swett Marden says about love as a youth preserver:

"Do not let go of love, or love of romance; they are amulets against wrinkles. If the mind is constantly bathed in love, and filled with helpful, charitable sentiments toward all, the body will keep fresh and vigorous many years longer than it will if the heart is dried up and emptied of human sympathy by a selfish, greedy life. The heart that is kept warm by love is never frozen by age or chilled by prejudice, fear, or anxious thought. A French beauty used to have herself massaged with mutton tallow, every night, in order to keep her muscles elastic and her body supple. A better way of preserving youthful elasticity is coming into vogue — massaging the mind with love thoughts, beauty thoughts, cheerful thoughts and young ideals.

"If you do not want the years to count, look forward instead of backward, and put as much variety and as many interests into your life as possible. Monotony and lack of mental occupation are great age-producers. Women who live in cities in the midst of many interests and great variety, preserve their youth and good looks, as a rule, much longer than women who live in remote country places, who get no variety into their lives, and who have no interests outside their narrow daily round of monotonous duties, which require no exercise of the mind.

Insanity is an alarmingly increasing result of the monotony of women's lives on the farm. Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt, 'who seem to have the ageless brightness of the stars,' attribute their youthfulness to action, change of thought and scene, and mental occupation. It is worth noting, too, that farmers who live so much outdoors, and in an environment much more healthful than the average brain worker, do not live so long as the latter."

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