Article July 4, 1914 Issue

Watchfulness

LILLIAN VON GESSNER

Not long ago I had occasion to go to a near-by city. The day was somewhat gloomy and the skies were overcast. As I took my seat in the train, my first thought was to turn to the window and push the shade well up, so that I might have an unobstructed view of the landscape,—not that I was expecting to make any special study of the latter, as it was already very familiar to me, but from an instinctive desire for light and for a broad outlook.

The matter which was taking me to the city seemed a somewhat complex one, and I realized that it was far wiser to study it in the light of truth rather than from a merely human, business point of view; so after settling down quietly I immediately began to work mentally over the problem before me. For a while all went well, and my spiritual vision seemed very clear. A sense of peace and quiet pervaded my mental atmosphere, and the way I was to go seemed to lie plainly before me. Minutes passed, and suddenly I became aware that a great change of feeling had taken place. A peculiar sadness appeared to be creeping over me, and a sense of darkness as well. I started, and turned to the window to find that very slowly, but none the less surely, the blinds had been slipping down and had now more than half concealed the outlook. I pushed them back into place, and this time made sure that they would stay. "There," I exclaimed, "is your lesson. Just as those blinds, which you were not watching, slipped slowly down and thus cut off the light of day, so a human sense of things has gradually crept into your mentality to darken your thought because you were not watching."

It is an old and a true saying, that there are no little things, and that it is on the small, invisible events of life that the greatest issues hang. As in the case of a giant tree, it is not the great, imposing-looking roots that do the most effective work, but rather the minute fibers that carry the sap to the heart of the plant; for though the big roots uphold the weight of the monarch of the forest by giving it a solid hold in the ground, the life-imparting sap is sucked up into and distributed throughout the giant by the myriad tiny fibers that seem no more substantial, many of them, than silken threads. Destroy these seemingly unimportant rootlets, and within a short time the leaves will first droops, then shrivel up, and a dead tree will soon be ready for the woodman's axe. So too in our daily experience, while the big problems, coming upon us suddenly, may seem at first to stun us, their next effect is to induce us to renew our energies; to work and study till the battle is o'er and the victory won, when we exultantly square our shoulders and take a deep breath. But it is the ceaseless, endless repetition of minute annoyances which, like the incessant singing of the mosquito that becomes so exasperating to our senses, seems to wear us out and sap our moral vitality.

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