Wake Up and Live - Chapter 8 - On Saving Breath

(Excerpt from The Strangest Secret Library – available on
Amazon.)
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On Saving Breath - 1
Chapter 8
EARLIER in these pages the advice not to talk has been
given. In fact it may seem that I believe one of the
prerequisites for success is to sink oneself into a surly
silence.
Nothing can be farther from the truth. To talk enough, to
talk persuasively, to establish and maintain friendly
relations with those around us, is of supreme importance to
effective living. Nevertheless, it is easy to talk too much, at
the wrong times, or with the wrong objective. Innumerable
proverbs exist to show that folk-wisdom has always
recognized a danger in excessive wordiness. "Speech is
silver, silence is golden"; "Much talk, little work"; "A
barking dog never bites," we say; we call the tongue "the
unruly member," say that a gossip's tongue is "hung in the
middle," speak of a demagogue as "a windbag," praise "a
man of few words," and are sometimes uncomfortably
impressed by the strength of laconic speech.
Without making too much of a point of the matter, a few of
the reasons for counseling silence may be worth examining.
Every great religious discipline insists on the wisdom of
learning the control of speech. Several Christian sects
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observe silences; some are vowed to perpetual silence. One
of the greatest and most famous philosophical religious
systems, that of the Indians, devotes an entire phase of its
training not only to controlling speech, but to controlling
breath: the Pranayama of the Hindus. In Latin the word for
breath and the word for soul are masculine and feminine
forms of the same root, in Greek they are identical.
There is more in this than meets the eye of the reader who is
always on the run.
Breathing is one of the few involuntary actions of the body
over which we can exercise voluntary control. That is to say,
it is on the borderline between the regions of the conscious
and the unconscious. The man or woman who can speak or
be silent as he chooses is the individual who has self control.
When the Unconscious has us fully at its mercy we talk not
as we should voluntarily choose to talk if we could see all
the consequences of our speech, but from a need to relieve
some half-perceived pressure. So we grumble humorously
about our difficulties, and make ourselves self-conscious by
doing so. Or we excuse ourselves defiantly. Or we complain
of a trifling injustice, and are sometimes startled to see how
much more pity we invoke than the occasion warrants. Once
Report excerpted from The Strangest Secret Library

we have found a wellspring of pity and indulgence in
another, we are seldom mature enough not to take
advantage of it, thus reinforcing our infantilism and
defeating our growth.
One of the worst wiles of the Will to Fail is that it forces its
victim to ask for unnecessary advice. Here again the
universal deep motive for asking advice(unnecessarily, it
should be emphasized once more) is that by so doing we can
go on feeling protected and cherished even though we are
no longer children. But that again means that we are being
provided with advance excuses for failure. If we act on the
advice of another and are unsuccessful, obviously the failure
is not ours but our counselor's; isn't that plain? So we can
continue to daydream of successful action, to believe that if
only we had followed our first impulse we could not have
failed.
Since such motives can be present, it is wise to scrutinize
every impulse to ask for advice. If the origin of the desire is
above suspicion, then there is only one further question to
ask before seeking help with a clear conscience: "If I
worked this out for myself, would I consume only my own
time?" If the answer to that is "Yes," then it is generally
better to work out the problem independently, unless the

amount of time so expended would be grossly
disproportionate to the importance of the result.
If you are a creative worker, remember that time spent in
finding an independent technique is seldom wasted. We are
accustomed to think of the success of a man like Joseph
Conrad, a Pole, in writing the English language, or of the
work of an electrical genius like Steinmetz, as savoring of
the miraculous. To have had to work out their problems
alone - what a tremendous obstacle to overcome! On the
contrary; the necessity for independent action was one of
the conditions of their success, and to see and admit this is
in no way to detract from the worth of their
accomplishment.
Most of us support each other and are in turn supported to
such an extent that we can make almost no individual
contribution; the final result of our labors is a sort of olla
podrida, a medley of tastes, talents and techniques, with
little to differentiate it from similar results. Look, for a
moment, at any of the run-of-the-mill novels of the day; at
the layout, wording and illustration of the advertisements in
any given magazine; at the comic strips in a number of
papers. Would it seem too far-fetched to say that although

one man, one woman, or one firm is actually behind each of
these bids for our attention, they all seem to have been
issued from a sort of central bureau? Yet however
uncomplainingly we absorb these issuances from the
Ministry for Novel-Writing, the Central Bureau for the
Production of Comic Strips, the Committee in Charge of
National Advertising, we save our real rewards for those
who bring us freshness or genius.
So the working out, however laborious, of an original
technique is worth the time expended, the loneliness
entailed. With that well in mind, let us consider those times
when advice should be taken.
You have a genuine problem. The first step, then, should be
to write it out, or to formulate it verbally with exactness, so
that you can see just what it is that is troubling you. If you
simply let the problem wash around in your mind, it will
seem greater, and much vaguer, than it will appear on close
examination. Then find your expert, whether friend or
stranger, but make every effort to find one whose views
seem to be congenial to you, since that usually implies
similar or congenial mental processes. To do so earlier will
mean that you are wasting both your time and his by
making him the audience of part of your self-examination.

If you are successful in getting an interview, make that as
short and concise as possible while still covering all your
points. Then follow the advice you are given until you see
definite results. If you are tempted to say "Oh, that won't
work for me," then you should suspect your own motives.
Such a rejection implies that you already had a course of
action in mind, and were more than half-hoping that you
would be advised to follow it. Watching an example of the
wrong attitude towards advice and instruction here may be
more illuminating than any positive example.
Have you ever seen the teacher of an art class at work?
Frequently he will find in the drawing of one pupil a flaw
which is so typical of most students' work at the same stage
that he will call the other pupils of the class around the
easel. Using the imperfect canvas as his text, he will branch
into criticism, advice, exhortation, and will occasionally go
on to rub out the mistake and draw the line or put in the
color as it should have been done. If you will observe the
group at this moment you will discover that, tragically
enough, everyone seems to be benefiting by the lecture
except the very pupil to whom it should be most valuable. In
almost every case the one whose work is providing the
example will be quivering, nervous, sometimes tearful,

often angry - in short, giving every sign that he is feeling so
personally humiliated and insulted that he is reacting at an
infantile level. If you ask for help, or put yourself into the
relation of a pupil to a teacher, learn to advance by your
mistakes instead of suffering through them. Keep your
attitude impersonal while you are being shown the road
back to the right procedure.
If you are in school, or taking class or private instruction, it
is wise to take every opportunity to ask well considered
questions, then to act on the information, and finally - and
very important - to report to your instructor as to your
success or failure through following his advice. This is of
advantage not only to you, but to him and his subsequent
pupils, since he cannot know what practices are effective
and what are only useful to himself and a few like him
unless his pupils report in this fashion. If you must
consistently report no progress, then one of two things must
be true: that you are not fully understanding him, or that
you are not working under the right master.
After your period of apprenticeship is over, try not to
weaken yourself or bring about self-doubt to such an extent
that you must have help on minor points of procedure.

Every physician and psychiatrist knows that there is a great
class of "sufferers" who return again and again, asking so
many and such trivial questions that it seems unlikely they
could ever have grown to maturity if they were as helpless in
all relations as they show themselves to their physicians. No
one except a charlatan truly welcomes the appearance of
such patients as these. The person who is looking for an
excuse to blame his failure on another or who will not, if he
can help it, grow up and settle his own difficulties, will go
on asking advice until he draws his last breath, and even the
astutest consultant may be forgiven if he sometimes
mistakes an infrequent questioner for one of the weaker
type.
A good touchstone to show whether you may be only
following a nervous habit of dependence is to ask yourself in
every case: "Would I ask this if I had to pay a specialist's fee
for the answer?" All busy persons whose work brings them
into the lime-light have frequent requests for personal
interviews. Usually they answer as well as they are able,
taking much trouble rather than run the risk of rebuffing
any talented or sensitive beginner; but they are ruthlessly
exploited. When, as sometimes happens, an eminent man
comes to the place where he answers no questions of this

sort, it is not that he is swollen with conceit, not that he
would not gladly help anyone in genuine perplexity, but that
he has no certain way of winnowing the sincere inquirers
from the neurotics, and, since he still has his own valuable
work to do, he reluctantly decides for silence. To console
himself he knows that many who are ready to do their own
work only frustrate themselves by acting with too much
humility, and that if their questions go unanswered they will
find their own satisfactory solutions.
So talking, complaining, asking advice, inviting suggestions
- all are better abandoned during the period of
re-education. Ultimately and ideally, of course, you want to
be able to work under any and all circumstances. You
cannot ever be certain that your favorite confidante or your
most stimulating friend will always be in a position to lend a
sympathetic ear at the moment that you feel you need it. If
you establish the habit of going to someone at a certain
point in your work, and lead yourself to feel, even
unconsciously, that this is necessary to a satisfactory
performance, you are laying the foundation of future failure.
Moreover, whatever your field may be, if you spend every
possible moment at creative activity, you will come to the
place where you have a body of your own work, a total of

experience, to consider; you will get the "feeling of your
material." Then you will see how many of your problems
arose because you had previously been in the position of an
amateur or novice, because you had so little experience in
your own line that for a while every problem seemed
unique.

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