The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Trifling Irritations
MOST men could have a leg cut off or receive a refusal of marriage from the girl they love with fortitude and resignation; it is the trifling irritations of life that try our courage and wreck our nervous systems. We can meet death without winking an eye lash, but cold pancakes for breakfast or a lost collar button unfits us for business for the day. Our friends and our reputations are often made or lost by the way in which we meet the seemingly insignificant situations of life.
I knew a man once who lived with his wife twenty years. They stood by each other through all sorts of sorrows and disasters, but he finally applied for a divorce. She had a persistent habit of taking his soiled handkerchief out of his pocket each evening and substituting a fresh one. It was a violation of his rights, which could not be brooked, and which bade fair to sour his whole disposition; he tried in vain to break her of the practice, and, failing in this, sought release from the annoyance through the divorce courts. Yet they had met with heroism and fortitude the serious things of life.
It is seldom the vital or the important occurrences which try our tempers or upset us, or make home heaven or hell for us; it is the trifling thing, the unexpected annoyance or omission.
Many of these things are largely matters of personal temperament to which we yield without a struggle. We even become elated or take pride in the fact, at times, that there are certain things which we do not like or which we can not stand. Some men boast of their little foibles or irritations as if they were an asset rather than a liability.
I heard a man admit the other day that a corroded pen, or a dry inkwell, or a waste paper basket put thoughtfully out of reach by the janitor did more to disturb his equanimity than a dozen difficult customers would have done.
In my undergraduate day I saw an otherwise well balanced instructor,—an experienced middle aged gentleman,—thrown into a frenzy because his hat dropped twice from the hook on which he was trying to hang it. He would have met a crisis in life with composure and complete placidity.
Perhaps when we learn to estimate men's characters justly it will not be wholly from the great crises which they meet, but by the trifling irritations as well which they are able to overlook or to control.
August