Have You Tried to Learn and Forget?

Lake County Mail, Issue 22, 22 October 1947, Page 9

Have You Tried to Learn and Forget?

A pudding isn’t a good pudding unless it has a good shape; and a life or a character isn’t a good life, or character, if it hasn’t a good shape. But that isn’t the whole of the story, Hazlitt says in one of his essays: “We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.” And that is true. We learn how to do a thing well, in order that we may forget how it’s done! The learning is necessary, but the forgetting is also necessary. Of course, it isn’t really forgetting; what we have learned sinks into the subsconscious mind; and it works there, automatically, without our thinking about it. Thinking Too Hard If you are writing a letter, and you want it to be a good letter; and you are thinking all the while how to make it a good letter, how to get the right word in the right place, or how to turn your sentences so as to make them read well; when you’ve finished it, it won’t really be a very good letter; there will be something a bit stiff, awkward, and self-conscious about it; because you are thinking too much, as Hazlitt said, “about the manner of doing it.” If you ever met your favourite author whose' writing you admire so much, and if you asked him how he manages to write so well, he would probably smile and say: “Oh, it’s easy; it just comes!” (He probably wouldn’t tell you of the years perhaps of hard work and drudgery —hard thinking, hard trying —that he had to go through before he became anybody’s favourite author.) It’s the same with everything else. A great actress would never be a great actress if she were thinking all the time of how to use her hands or her voice; or whether she should stand here, or move across the stage to somewhere else, and technical things of that kind. You may be with a little party of friends; and a woman comes into join you. She is a stranger to you, so naturally you have your eye on her. And you notice the way she shakes hands, and the way she smiles, and the pleasant word she has on the tip of her tongue when she is to you, and the grace with which she moves and takes her place in the group; and you say to yourself, “ How perfectly charming she is!” And so she is. But she wouldn’t be nearly so charming if all the. time she was thinking how charmingly she was doing everything. The woman who can never be really charming is the woman who is always thinking about being charming! Life gets easier as you go along if you understand the art of living. Even work does! Hard Work When you start on a new job it’s hard work. Why is it hard work? Because you have to think such a lot about it; to think so carefully, so concentratcdly, of this detail or that detail, of exactly how it should be done. You come back home, after your first day at it, mentally tired out. After the next day, if you are a good and faithful worker, you are not so tired out. And by degrees it tires you less and less.

And the less it tires you, the better you do it. Why is that? Because gradually a good deal of it becomes automatic; you do it without thinking about it; you can do this detail or that detail perfectly well without having to concentrate your mind on it; and because your mind is less in it, your heart can be more in it. The best worker is the woman who can put her whole heart into her job, because it is no longer necessary to put her whole mind into “ the, manner of doing it.” You’ve got to go through that first drudgery; you’ve got to learn detail by detail, by trial and error, by making mistakes and getting “told off”; you’ve got to acquire skill by concentrated effort. But with this penn’orth of drudgery you buy a pound of freedom. So I am quite right in trying to hammer into you the necessity of getting for yourself a good shape to your personal character, of getting a good pattern of life for yourself, of practicing good habits, of getting a good scale of values so that you can put tilings in their right order and appreciate their true worth. And I don’t pretend that this is easy, or that it will come to you in a moment. But it will come. And when you have the good shape, and the good pattern, the good “ manner of doing it,” you will be able to go ahead without worrying any more about it, and live effectively, and joyously, and splendidly, with a full heart and a free spirit. It will be easy; and it will all be beautiful. “Well done,” because you have no longer need “to think about the manner of doing it.” I promise you this freedom, if you will be faithful in discipline and drudgery to begin with. You will write lovely letters, and sing lovely songs, and make the most charming entrances into new company, and all “ without thinking about it.”