CHAPTER 6

ON PULLING TOGETHER

Here is what I said in a letter to R. M.:

I AM afraid the trouble with you is that you can see nothing except from your own personal standpoint. Your sympathies are all with yourself. You excuse yourself and blame your husband and your conditions. If this is so you are on the wrong track, and you will meet nothing but disappointment.

But you are young! All young people are more or less selfish and self-centered. And while there's youth there's hope.

But I suspect your mind is reaching out in the wrong direction. It seems to me that the way to better your condition is to put all your love and energy and ingenuity into making a splendid home for the babies and your husband, and into making every dollar do the work of two or three. Look for the good points in your husband, and magnify them and glorify them. Inspire him. Love him. Rejoice in him. Let him know you would do anything in the world for him. And do this one thing that lies at your hand — this one thing of making a satisfying home life, which is at the root of every man's inspiration and accomplishment. No man can do his best in business without a loving and capable wife as his inspiration.

If you put your thought, energy, and love into the home life it won't be long till you will see him doing better in his business life.

Practice New Thought with a will. Your highest thoughts will certainly find circulation in his being. The believing wife shall sanctify the husband. The loving and believing wife shall inspire the husband. Every good thought of yours will certainly make its impress in and through him. The key to your problem is the key to your own soul. Find yourself, realize your oneness with all power, all love, all wisdom, and use your love and power and wisdom for the re-creation and regeneration of your world.

Don't you think that if you cannot do what you want to do just now, it is the best thing for you to do with all your will what you can do? If you can't have what you want, then want what you can have, and use it to the best advantage.

Usefulness, health, happiness, and prosperity are yours and his. Be still and know.

As to your being on the right path nobody can decide that but yourself. Find yourself. Let the Spirit of Love guide you. And remember that whatever you and your husband do you must do together. Wherever he will not pull with you, you must change your tactics and pull with him. Only so can you accomplish what you desire. You must agree in whatsoever you are planning to do. If you think you know more than he does and you insist on his doing it your way in spite of his judgment and will, then you will surely end in shipwreck. Work together. Pull TOGETHER, otherwise don't pull.

Here is a letter to B. G. on the same subject:

If I had a good husband that suddenly turned ill-tempered like that I would certainly think that he was sick. Sick mentally or physically, or both; and I would treat him in that way. That is, I would keep silent when he raved, and I would take good pains never to cross him in any way I could possibly avoid. I would teach my children that he was sick, that there was something wrong with him, and that in due time he would recover. Then I would affirm health and prosperity for him in the silence, especially while he was asleep, and I would always remember him as he was when he was good to me. And I would never for a moment give up the belief that he would come out of his sickness and be just as beautiful and good again, and maybe more so. It may be that he is living a very monotonous life of hard work, and that his nerve is going to pieces under it.

As to your two bright boys, they can learn beautiful manners from you. They can learn loving kindness from you. And it is very often the case that when boys have a very bad example in a father they are particularly good themselves through natural abhorrence of the bad example set before them. You need not worry over that provided you live a beautiful life yourself.

But there are one or two things you owe to yourself and the children. You are probably overworked yourself, just as your husband is. You must use your own good sense and best thoughts to cut down your work. Do not work too many hours a day, and take time for rest and recreation and play every day with your children. Allow enough time for this so that you will not wake up tired and fagged out in the morning, nor go to bed fagged out at night. You MUST keep yourself in good trim, and you must keep your children in good trim physically, or you will certainly go under. Arrange your work some way so there will be less of it. I know it is hard, but your own mind and heart are equal to it. Keep on reading and practicing New Thought.

Above all things set aside a certain time for play and rest and recreation every day, and don't let anything interfere with that. Go off in the woods with your children and play. This is the one thing that will keep you healthy and sane. Take your New Thought books with you and lie down on the ground and read and rest, and play with the children. Make a regular picnic every day, and you will soon find yourself becoming stronger and happier and fuller of ideas and inspirations, so that you will be able to work out all the problems that you are putting up to me. Go in to win and stick to it. Don't let ANYTHING interfere with your daily picnic outdoors! Never mind what your husband says about it — remember that he is overworked, too, and he is not responsible for what he says and does. Just you take that little picnic every day and get yourself and your children into splendid trim, and you will find your problems solving themselves. I tell you, the joy of life is your strength to solve the problems of life, and a daily picnic such as I have described will enable you to store up the joy of life in abundance. Nothing else will do it!

And gradually you will find your husband coming in tune with you and changing again for the better. Perhaps you will find him coming out to picnic with you some day! The trouble with you all is that you are overworked until life seems a monotonous grind. The daily picnic is the only thing that will break that monotony and enable you to recover your enthusiasm and your bright ideas and good will to work.

No, you cannot drive your husband away from you and keep the place, not in law. And you would never forgive yourself for doing it anyway. Make a success of life right there, with him! Go in to win and stick to it. That way lies joy and education and evolution. Be sure you study farm magazines and books with the children and do your work in the most up-to-date fashion. Out of all that farm work the children will get a splendid education, and also out of the reading you do with them. And in due time, as they get older, ways will open by which they can go to school. It will not hurt them if they do not go to school for a little while — the new educators, who have the new philosophy of education, all say that children should not be sent to school at all until they are ten or twelve years old, that they will learn so fast after that that they will catch up in no time.

And lest the wives should feel that this is a one-sided chapter, here is what I said to a husband:

Did you ever read "The Taming of the Shrew," by Shakespeare? Do it. Do it again. Maybe you can apply those tactics with your wife. And it sometimes happens with a woman who nags that the only way to cure her is for the man to raise the roof with one everlasting row of about two minutes' duration, after which he leaves the house and stays out till she comes to. I have known such upheavals as that to cure cases of nagging.

Sometimes it takes the Sequestration Cure to do it. I used this to cure my children of the squabbling habit — as related in that little "How to Train Children and Parents." It works with children of any growth.

You can practice the Sequestration Cure on your children whenever you are at home.

Of course you cannot compel your wife to go away into a room and sit down until she comes to her true self, but you can go away into a room and sit down until she comes to. I tell you IT WORKS ! And if the two of you will do this for the benefit of the children you will find the differences between you solving themselves.

Perhaps you are the nagger! — maybe you keep twitching the rag when your wife starts scolding. I knew a man who used to do that. He would say some little thing that started his wife scolding, and then he would sit with his back to her and chuckle, and wait till she ran down a little, whereupon he would say another little sarcastic thing to start her again.

It takes two to make a quarrel you know, and either one can stop it. And it is the fellow who answers backthat starts the quarrel!

My father and my mother made a compact when they were married that when one got angry the other was to keep perfectly still until the mad fit was gone. They kept their promise, and they never quarreled. There is no patent on this method of nipping quarrels in the bud. Why not use it?

Get together and work for the sake of those children. They are vastly more important than the quarrels of yourself and wife! Subdue yourselves and devote yourselves to the upbringing of the children. In that way your differences will melt away before you know it.

There is the allopathic cure for the nagger. Shakespeare described it. It will work if applied at the right time and place by a wise and fearless lover.

Then there is the New Thought cure, not so bitter to take, workable in a greater number of cases.

According to New Thought principles the taming of the shrew is a matter of going into the silence. You apply the medicine of peace to yourself, and in due time the nagger catches the ease — telepathically.

When it comes to standing up for your rights there is no end to the bickerings. If you are a stickler for exact justice you will never get to the end of the hair-splittings. Harmony is LOVE, and love dissipates the hair-splittings and covers all the unpleasantnesses, and love gives so readily that there are no hair-splittings and no unpleasantnesses.

Standing up for your rights once in a year or so may be a necessity, but standing up for your rights every day is merely a very bad habit. Sit down, let go, let the other fellow take a few of your rights if he wants them. You will have plenty left — the right to smile and make light, for instance.

Your every-day rights that have to be fought for are not worth the bad habit bred within you.

Let go all the rights you can in conscience, and you will soon find the other fellow letting go, too.

Fight begets fight.

Overcome fight with faith and kindness.

You can take all your truly-rights without talking.

You can't take your rights with your tongue.

Be still and know that your best means of defense is a volley of soft answers. And here is another letter I wrote to a young married woman with nothing much to do:

The chief trouble with you is that you have nothing very much to do. Because you have no important purpose in life your mind becomes filled up with trivialities, and you spend your days multiplying IB-your mind the foolish little things that you would forget instantly if you only had something more important to engage your mental and physical powers.

I suspect that you ought to have children, and that you are avoiding it. There are too many young women in the world that are making that mistake, and they do not realize it as a mistake until they are so old that they are afraid.

Judging from your letter it seems to me that you are fully as intolerant and trivial as your Methodist relatives-in-law with whom you live! And you are shirking all the serious things of life that your mother-in-law and father-in-law have made the chief end of life — the raising of children and the making of a home, for instance. They, and their son, too, must be just a little disappointed in you, don't you think?

You need to find some thoroughly good outlet for your energies, or you will go from bad to worse until you become obsessed with the idea that everybody is against you and nothing is right that anybody else in the house says or does. Your little thoughts of criticism and contempt will grow and grow until at last they burst the love-tie that binds you to that family — the marriage tie.

The only way to prevent growing apart from your husband is to find a legitimate PURPOSE in life and devote yourself to it to such an extent that you will simply not notice nor care for the little things that are said or not said by other members of your own family.

The first thing that comes to my mind as a good legitimate purpose, is the raising of a family. But of course nobody can decide about that but you and your husband. Where two are agreed as touching a purpose, children or anything else, success is theirs.

"When two are agreed as touching anything it shall be done unto them," says the Good Book, and that is a law of nature, not a mere arbitrary promise from a god somewhere away off in the universe.

I can't think of anything greater a man and a woman can do for the world than to agree in the raising of a fine family. I don't mean a large family, but a fine one. Mary and Joseph raised a fine family of one — Jesus, which is called the Christ.

But if you simply can't and won't have children, then find some other splendid purpose. Adopt somebody else's children! — or adopt an orphan asylum, or a social center, or a social settlement, or some other splendid charity, and devote yourself to that. Pick out a fine purpose that your husband can join you in, and then both of you work for it.

Subdue yourself, devote yourself: that is the law of happiness and development. You can overcome evil with good.

You can overcome petty things with love and good will. But the only way to generate love and good will is by using it every day in some good purposeful work.

Probably the main thing with you is that you are a splendid strong executive who needs plenty of work, and you are trying to lead instead a butterfly existence on a flowery bed of ease. Excuse the mixed metaphor.

Your Methodist relatives-in-law probably represent your own conscience that is pricking you into action! Wake up and get busy — so busy that you can't remember petty things.

S. A. S. was at "outs" with her whole family. This is what I said to her:

Greetings and Good Will! I have no fault to find with what you contemplate doing. Many women have left their husbands and older children to hold down the homestead while they took the little ones into town to attend school while Mother earned money. Such things help sometimes under stress of pioneer life. Many women have worked like Trojans to help take care of the children and support the family and make things easier. What you have in mind to do is nothing more than thousands of other noble women have done and done well.

But I object to the spirit in which you are doing it! Evidently you are not doing it for love of your people, to help keep the claims they have taken and work out the ideals they are striving for. Judging from your letter you have been feeding yourself on MISTAKES all the time, until you cannot see anything but mistakes everywhere about you. This makes you resent and resist what the others in the family want to do. You are forgetting your New Thought - THAT ALL THINGS WORK TOGETHER FOR GOOD, and that if the family pulls together and works together it can keep all those claims and accomplish what it desires. What you want to do may be perfectly right and the best possible thing, and I would not wonder if it is. But the spirit in which you are doing it is not right, and it is not helpful to husband, children, or yourself.

What you need is a thorough course on my little "Solar Plexus" book! Read it, a chapter or two at a time, every day for the next six months. Get into the spirit of it and SHINE.

After you have got into the spirit of it, then talk these matters over with your husband, and perhaps with other members of your family, and get their consent and their good will to your doing what you want to do. Then see that you give them your good will in what they are aiming to do, and let all the family pull together to save the claims and develop them.

The things that you relate in this letter and call mistakes do not look to me like mistakes at all — they look like good things, all working for better and higher good to you and to all the family. See that you get into the spirit of love and work with them. Pioneer life is strenuous and it needs all our New Thought.

Go in to win and stick to it, and peace and all prosperity be with you and that splendid family. They are all trying to work for glorious things, and I know you want to help them. When people work hard and strive hard for big things they are apt to say cross things once in a while, but we must forgive it all and keep on letting our own soul shine for the good of everybody.

ON DEALING WITH REFRACTORY HUSBANDS >

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