With most of us, the disease or discomfort is positive, and our effort against it is negative or no effort at all.  A negative effort probably protects us from worse evil, but that is all; it does not seem to me that it can ever take us ahead, whereas a positive effort, while sometimes we seem to move upward in very slow stages, often takes us in great strides out of the enemy’s country.

If we have the measles, the whooping cough, scarlet fever—­even more serious diseases—­and make the disease negative and our effort to free ourselves from it positive, the result is one thousand times worth while.  And where the children have the measles and the whooping cough, and do not know how to help nature, the mothers can be positive for the children and make their measles and whooping cough negative.  The positive attitude of a mother toward her sick child puts impatience or despair out of the question.

Do not think that I believe one can be positive all at once.  We must work hard and insist over and over again before we can attain the positive attitude and having attained it, we have to lose it and gain it again, lose it and gain it again, many times before we get the habit of making all difficulties of mind and body negative, and our healthy attitude toward conquering them positive.

I said “difficulties of mind and body.”  I might better have said “difficulties of body, mind and character,” or even character alone, for, after all, when you come to sift things down, it is the character that is at the root of all human life.

I know a woman who is contantly complaining.  Every morning she has a series of pains to tell of, and her complaints spout out of her in a half-irritated, whining tone as naturally as she breathes.  Over and over you think when you listen to her how useful all those pains of hers would be if she took them as a reminder to yield and in yielding to do her work better.  But if one should venture to suggest such a possibility, it would only increase the complaints by one more—­that of having unsympathetic friends and being misunderstood.  “Nobody understands me—­nobody understands me.”  How often we hear that complaint.  How often in hearing it we make the mental question, “Do you understand yourself?”

You see the greatest impediment to our understanding ourselves is our unwillingness to see what is not good in ourselves.  It is easy enough in a self-righteous attitude of what we believe to be humility to find fault with ourselves, but quite another thing when others find fault with us.  When we are giving our attention to discomforts and pains in a way to give them positive power, and some one suggests that we might change our aim, then the resistance and resentment that are roused in us are very indicative of just where we are in our character.