The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Keeping Cool
DURING the last few days while the sun has been pouring down upon us and the thermometer has been climbing up to the one hun dred mark no one has seemed willing to let his neighbor forget the weather.
"Is it hot enough for you?" the grocer's boy queries as he runs in with the day's provisions. "Pretty hot day," a professor ventures, mopping his dripping dome as he speaks. "Some weather," the student says as he makes his exit from the class room.
Keeping cool is quite as much a matter of temperament as of temperature; it is a state of mind as well as a condition of the weather. The people who stand the heat the worst are those who never allow themselves to forget it, who talk about it continually, who are never still, who rush from one place to another in a frenzy of desire to find a cool spot; who fuss and fume and fan until they are red in the face and running perspiration. The best way to keep cool is to go about your work methodically, be as quiet as you can, and forget the weather.
It is much the same way with the other worries of life. We grow hot over the slights and insults, we are agitated over our misfortunes as we talk of them, and let our minds dwell upon them, and exaggerate them. We are constantly tending the fires of anger or resentment or they would shortly burn themselves out.
The man who under stress, and irritation, and misrepresentation can keep his balance, can control his temper and his tongue, can subdue the rising emotions, has conserved his own strength, has made it possible for himself to do more and better work, and has more than half defeated the purposes of his opponent.
"How can you sit so calmly and say nothing?" I asked a friend of mine not long ago, who was the subject of a bitter, untruthful personal attack. "Because the cooler I keep, the hotter and the weaker his words become," was the answer.
So far as we can, we may better take the hot words and hot days quietly, without comment, without physical agitation. There is a force and a strength in keeping cool.
August