How good are you at controlling your emotions?
If you are really angry, what do you do to cool yourself down?
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In our ‘high living and low thinking’ age, most of the peace of mind today comes in the form of bottle containing tranquilizer pills. Until there is a greater trend toward ‘plain living ad high thinking’ the tranquilizer business will continue to boom.
It was intended that man should be a tranquil soul. To be free from disturbing emotions, commotion or tumult is to be a man. To be peaceful, quite and clam, when others all about us are losing their ‘minds and heads,’ is to exercise our greatest birthright – the complete control of our mental faculties.
We cannot enjoy the happy state of tranquility unless we are prepared for it, unless we are trained to recognize, use and enjoy it. Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher, born about 40 A.D., told of Socrates’ wonderful state of tranquility as he was about to go on trial for his life: ‘Thus said Socrates to one who put him in mind to prepare himself for his trial: ‘Do you think I have been preparing myself for this very thing my whole life long?’
‘By what kind of preparation?’
‘I have attended to my own work.’
‘What mean you?’
‘I have done nothing unjust, either in public or in private life.’
Speaking of Epictetus, his system was of an extremely practical nature.
Everything earthly, he said, which may be divided into two classes, things which are within our own control, and things over which we have no control, and it is the point of wisdom to live for the one and not to let the mind be disturbed by the other.‘Nothing can bring you peace but yourself,’ said Emerson. Tranquilizers, in the form of pills, may have their place in medicine, but they are a poor substitute for the real thing that comes from within.
By Sidney Newton Bremer, Ph. D.