【正文】 uture. Let’s benchmark the parameters: Yes, I will die. I’ve dealt with the deaths of both parents, a best friend, a beloved boss and cherished pets. Some of these deaths have been violent, before my eyes, or slow and agonizing. Bad stuff, and it belongs at the bottom of the scale. Then there are those high points: romance and marriage to the right person。t felt that there was a winwin solution. If I do one thing, I39。 most of the time you are the victor looking at the situation from the wrong view! The view is yours to choose. The Folly of Anxiety Half the people on our streets look as though life was a sorry business. It is hard to find a happy looking man or woman. Worry is the cause of their woebegone appearance. Worry makes the wrinkles。 no matter how heavy our loads may seem to be we have no right to throw their burden on others nor even to cast the shadow of them on other hearts. Anxiety is instability. Fret steals away force. He who dreads tomorrow trembles today. Worry is weakness. The successful men may be always wideawake, but they never worry. Fret and fear are like fine sand, thrown into life39。 but happiness es in definite ways. It is the casting out of our foolish fears that we may have room for a few of our mon joys. It is the telling our worries to wait until we get through appreciating our blessings. Take a deep breath, raise your chest, lift your eyes from the ground, look up and think how many things you have for which to be grateful, and you will find a smile growing where one may long have been unknown. Take the right kind of thought—for to take no thought would be sin—but take the calm, unanxious thought of your business, your duties, your difficulties, your disappointments and all the things that once have caused you fear, and you will find yourself laughing at most of them. My Perfect House My house is perfect. By great good fortune I have found a housekeeper no less to my mind, a lowvoiced, lightfooted woman of discreet age, strong and deft enough to render me all the service I require, and not afraid of loneliness. She rises very early. By my breakfasttime there remains little to be done under the roof save dressing of meals. Very rarely do I hear even a clink of 4 crockery。 the work in wood and plaster tells of a more leisurely and a more honest age than ours. The stairs do not creak under my step。s home is fort。 but, if I did, even so long should I have the money to pay my rent and buy my food. I am no cosmopolite. Were I to think that I should die away from England, the thought would be dreadful to me. And in England, this is the place of my choice。t follow the catastrophe on the Gulf Coast as closely as I might have, but those weeks taught me some things about catastrophe and about the kindness of strangers. All catastrophes are personal. Some in the Gulf Coast sought survival。s health should not ruin us, upon the doctors and clerks and ambulance drivers. We depended upon a mitment made to helping others. This mitment is a web that holds us together in times of need. By the time we took Owen home, the worst effects of Katrina were evident. I watched the images from the Gulf Coast, images of munities, lives and families whose fabric had been torn apart. I thought of that web of strangers that had embraced my family in our time of need, and that it is the most fortunate among us who are served best by it. I can only hope this web will be strong enough, that it will be spun wide, that it will hold and care for many, that we can all depend upon the kindness of strangers. “ Packing” a Person A person, like a modity, needs packaging. But going too far is absolutely undesirable. A little exaggeration, however, does no harm when it shows the person39。s pany is like reading a thick book of deluxe edition that fascinates one so much as to be reluctant to part with. As long as one finds where one stands, one knows how to package oneself, just as a modity establishes its brand by the right packaging. Sorrow of the Millionaire The unfortunate millionaire has the responsibility of tremendous wealth without the possibility of enjoying himself more than any ordinary rich man. Indeed, in many things he cannot enjoy himself more than many poor men do, nor even so much, for a drum major is better dressed, a trainer’s stable lad often rides a better horse。 I do not expect the house to fall。t always friendly. And even when they agreed to give me some of their time, the results weren39。m successful and, in my business, pretty well known. So why do I continue to subject myself to this sort of thing? The answer is simple: Disrupting my fort zone, bombarding myself with challenging people and situations— this is the best way that I know to keep growing. And to paraphrase a biologist I once met, if you39。s okay. The disfort, the uncertainty, the physical and mental challenge that I get from this— all the things that too many of us spend our time and energy trying to avoid— they are precisely the things that keep me in the game. Two Ways of Thinking of History There are two ways of thinking of history. There is, first, history regarded as a way of looking at other things, really the temporal aspect of anything, from the universe to this nib with which I am writing. Everything has its history. There is the history of the universe, if only we knew it— and we know something of it, if we do not know much. Nor is the contrast so great, when you e to think of it, between the universe and this pennib. A mere pennib has quite a considerable history. There is, to begin with, what has been written with it, and that might be something quite important. After all it was probably only one quillpen or a couple that wrote Hamlet. Whatever has been written with the pennib is part of its History. In addition to that there is the history of its manufacture: this particular nib