CHAPTER 4

HOW CONCENTRATION ELIMINATES DRUDGERY

DO I believe in turning all the attention upon each detail of every-day work? Yes. Pour all your thought into this piece of work until you can do it to perfection and with joy. As long as you have irksome tasks or "drudgery" you may rest assured it is because you have not yet put in interested thought enough.

This is the finest "concentration" practice in the world — just to put your whole soul into the one thing you are doing. When you have used this practice long enough you will do the thing beautifully and with joy.

About this time you will find your thought force has flowed into this work and filled it full of energy - and is overflowing. You will take happy little mental flights away from your work; little inspirations will come to you, and always your thought will come back to your work with pleasure.

Suppose your work just now is "five finger exercises"— learning to use your fingers. If you put all your thought into each movement you will make each accurately. If you let your mind wander, ever so little your fingers follow. Your exercises will be slovenly because your thought is divided and you haven't enough to bear dividing. If you practice with a divided mind it will take you five times as long to accomplish the art of using your fingers, and you will never use them to the best advantage. I hear daily some one across the street practicing scales. She runs one scale nicely because she thinks about it. After that I can read her wandering half-mind in those slovenly, uneven runs. I can tell when she is pleased or not, and I know the very instant she thinks of something nice she is going to do when she gets through that hour of "drudgery." You see her fingers are trying to express a divided mind, so their action is uncertain. And will always be so unless she mends her mind and turns it all into her fingers until her fingers are full to overflowing.

When this happens the thought flows, or overflows, in beautiful fancies which the fingers are ready to express. And all is pleasure.

Do you see now what "concentration" upon daily tasks is for? To fill your members, the different parts of your body, with loving intelligence in expressing thought. The every-day tasks set you in the school of life are the "scales" and "five finger exercises" that you must put your soul into mastering before that soul can express anything more beautiful in the way of life-symphonies.

There is a vast difference between putting all your thought into an action until you can do it subconsciously and your thought is freed on a higher plane, and the common way of putting half — or less — of your thought energy into "drudgery," done in a slipshod, ungraceful fashion, whilst the main body of your thought goes gallivanting around where it has no business to be.

Thought is vitalizing, energizing. When you try to work with half your thought switched off and out of your activities you rob and devitalize your body.

To a fully vitalized body every act is joy. Whenever your work is "drudgery" stop short, call your thought home, take three or four very slow, full breaths of fresh air — straighten up to do it! — and then quietly turn all your thought into your actions. Every time you catch it wandering again bring it quietly, but firmly, back to business. This is the sort of "concentration" that gives self-command and fits you to think higher thoughts and fill higher places. And the moment you are ready the omnipresent Law of Attraction will whisk you into place.

SUCCESS FOR TWO >

< HELP FOR THE DRUDGING WIFE

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