How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
阿诺德.本涅特 Arnold Bennett
III PRECAUTIONS BEFORE BEGINNING
Now that I have succeeded (if succeeded I have) in persuading you to admitto yourself that you are constantly haunted by a suppressed dissatisfactionwith your own arrangement of your daily life; and that the primal cause ofthat inconvenient dissatisfaction is the feeling that you are every day leavingundone something which you would like to do, and which, indeed, you arealways hoping to do when you have "more time"; and now that I have drawnyour attention to the glaring, dazzling truth that you never will have "moretime," since you already have all the time there is--you expect me to let youinto some wonderful secret by which you may at any rate approach the idealof a perfect arrangement of the day, and by which, therefore, that haunting,unpleasant, daily disappointment of things left undone will be got rid of!
I have found no such wonderful secret. Nor do I expect to find it, nor do Iexpect that anyone else will ever find it. It is undiscovered. When you firstbegan to gather my drift, perhaps there was a resurrection of hope in yourbreast. Perhaps you said to yourself, "This man will show me an easy,unfatiguing way of doing what I have so long in vain wished to do." Alas,no! The fact is that there is no easy way, no royal road. The path to Meccais extremely hard and stony, and the worst of it is that you never quite getthere after all.
The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one's life so thatone may live fully and comfortably within one's daily budget of twenty-four hours is the calm realisation of the extreme difficulty of the task, ofthe sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands. I cannot too stronglyinsist on this.
If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniouslyplanning out a time-table with a pen on a piece of paper, you had bettergive up hope at once. If you are not prepared for discouragements anddisillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort,then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze whichyou call your existence.
It is very sad, is it not, very depressing and sombre? And yet I think itis rather fine, too, this necessity for the tense bracing of the will beforeanything worth doing can be done. I rather like it myself. I feel it to bethe chief thing that differentiates me from the cat by the fire.
"Well," you say, "assume that I am braced for the battle. Assume thatI have carefully weighed and comprehended your ponderous remarks;how do I begin?" Dear sir, you simply begin. There is no magic methodof beginning. If a man standing on the edge of a swimming-bath andwanting to jump into the cold water should ask you, "How do I begin tojump?" you would merely reply, "Just jump. Take hold of your nerves,and jump."
As I have previously said, the chief beauty about the constant supply oftime is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day,the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoilt, as if youhad never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career. Whichfact is very gratifying and reassuring. You can turn over a new leaf everyhour if you choose. Therefore no object is served in waiting till next week,or even until to-morrow. You may fancy that the water will be warmer nextweek. It won't. It will be colder.
But before you begin, let me murmur a few words of warning in your privateear.
Let me principally warn you against your own ardour. Ardour in well-doingis a misleading and a treacherous thing. It cries out loudly for employment;you can't satisfy it at first; it wants more and more; it is eager to movemountains and divert the course of rivers. It isn't content till it perspires.And then, too often, when it feels the perspiration on its brow, it weariesall of a sudden and dies, without even putting itself to the trouble of saying,"I'vehad enough of this."
Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little.Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own.
A failure or so, in itself, would not matter, if it did not incur a loss of self-esteem and of self-confidence. But just as nothing succeeds like success,so nothing fails like failure. Most people who are ruined are ruined byattempting too much. Therefore, in setting out on the immense enterpriseof living fully and comfortably within the narrow limits of twenty-fourhours a day, let us avoid at any cost the risk of an early failure. I will notagree that, in this business at any rate, a glorious failure is better than apetty success. I am all for the petty success. A glorious failure leads tonothing; a petty success may lead to a success that is not petty.
account to me on the spur of the moment for the other eight.
So let us begin to examine the budget of the day's time. You say yourday is already full to overflowing. How? You actually spend in earningyour livelihood--how much? Seven hours, on the average? And in actualsleep, seven? I will add two hours, and be generous. And I will defy youto account to me on the spur of the moment for the other eight hours.