ard. But it seems to me that
most of the terrific hurrying we do hasn't much to do with really
essential work after all. It's a kind of habit we get into, a sort of
madness, like the thing that overtakes the crowd at a ferry landing or
the entrance to a train. I've seen men, and women, too, fairly fight
to get onto a particular car when the next car would have done just
exactly as well.

Where are they going in such a hurry? To save a life? To mend a broken
heart? To help to heal a wounded spirit? Or are they just rushing
because the rest do it?

What do they get out of life--these people who are always in a rush?

Look! The laurel tree in my California garden is full of bursting
buds! The rains are beginning and the trees will soon be flecked with
a silver veil of blossoms. I hadn't noticed it before. I've been too
busy.

What's your hurry? Come, friend of my heart, I'll say that to you
to-day and say it in deep and friendly earnest.

What's your hurry? Come, let's go for a walk together and see
if we can find out. Let us keep finding out through all the
new year.

There are many other causes of worry, some of them so insidious, so
powerful, as to call for treatment in special chapters.

CHAPTER VIII

PROTEAN FORMS OF WORRY

In a preceding chapter, I have shown that worry is a product of our
modern civilization, and that it belongs only to the Occidental world.
It is a modern disease, prevalent only among the so-called civilized
peoples. There is no doubt that in many respects we _are_ what we call
ourselves--the most highly civilized people in the world. But do we
not pay too high a price for much of our civilization? If it is such
that it fails to enable us to conserve our health, our powers of
enjoyment, our spontaneity, our mental vigor, our spirituality, and
the exuberant radiance of our life--bodily, mental, spiritual--I feel
that we need to examine it carefully and find out wherein lies its
inadequacy or its insufficiency.

While our civilization has reached some very elevated points, and some
men have made wonderful advancement in varied fields, it cannot be
denied that the mass of men and women are still groping along in
the darkness of mental mediocrity, and on the mud-flats of the
commonplace. Ten thousand men and women can now read where ten alone
read a few centuries ago. But what are the ten thousand reading? That
which will elevate, improve, benefit? See the piles of sen