How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
Page: 21

your mind has skipped away under your very eyes and is larking round
the corner with another subject.

Bring it back by the scruff of the neck. Ere you have reached the station
you will have brought it back about forty times. Do not despair. Continue.
Keep it up. You will succeed. You cannot by any chance fail if you
persevere. It is idle to pretend that your mind is incapable of concentration.
Do you not remember that morning when you received a disquieting letter
which demanded a very carefully-worded answer? How you kept your mind
steadily on the subject of the answer, without a second's intermission, until
you reached your office; whereupon you instantly sat down and wrote the
answer? That was a case in which *you* were roused by circumstances to
such a degree of vitality that you were able to dominate your mind like a tyrant.
You would have no trifling. You insisted that its work should be done, and its
work was done.

By the regular practice of concentration (as to which there is no secret--
save the secret of perseverance) you can tyrannise over your mind (which
is not the highest part of *you*) every hour of the day, and in no matter
what place. The exercise is a very convenient one. If you got into your
morning train with a pair of dumb-bells for your muscles or an encyclopaedia
in ten volumes for your learning, you would probably excite remark. But as
you walk in the street, or sit in the corner of the compartment behind a pipe,
or "strap-hang" on the Subterranean, who is to know that you are engaged in
the most important of daily acts? What asinine boor can laugh at you?

I do not care what you concentrate on, so long as you concentrate. It is the
mere disciplining of the thinking machine that counts. But still, you may as
well kill two birds with one stone, and concentrate on something useful. I
suggest--it is only a suggestion--a little chapter of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus.

Do not, I beg, shy at their names. For myself, I know nothing more "actual,"
more bursting with plain common-sense, applicable to the daily life of plain
persons like you and me (who hate airs, pose, and nonsense) than Marcus