Live in "daytight compartments."

Photo by THE B.S. REPORT

We toss and we turn sensing danger around every curve in our life, yet the battles we've lost have yet to manifest. One technique that I use to guide me through my hectic day was revealed to me in the book aptly titled, "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living," by Dale Carnegie. Seems that not enough of us live in what Sir William Osler called, "daytight compartments."
A few months before he spoke at Yale, Sir William Osier had crossed the Atlantic on a great ocean liner where the captain standing on the bridge, could press a button and-presto!-there was a clanging of machinery and various parts of the ship were immediately shut off from one another-shut off into watertight compartments.

“Now each one of you,” Dr. Osier said to those Yale students, “is a much more marvelous organisation than the great liner, and bound on a longer voyage. What I urge is that you so learn to control the machinery as to live with ‘day-tight compartments’ as the most certain way to ensure safety on the voyage. Get on the bridge, and see that at least the great bulkheads are in working order. Touch a button and hear, at every level of your life, the iron doors shutting out the Past-the dead yesterdays. Touch another and shut off, with a metal curtain, the Future -the unborn tomorrows. Then you are safe-safe for today! …

Shut off the past! Let the dead past bury its dead. … Shut out the yesterdays which have lighted fools the way to dusty death. … The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter. Shut off the future as tightly as the past. … The future is today. … There is no tomorrow. The day of man’s salvation is now.
Waste of energy, mental distress, nervous worries dog the steps of a man who is anxious about the future. … Shut close, then the great fore and aft bulkheads, and prepare to cultivate the habit of life of ‘day-tight compartments’.”

Did Dr. Osier mean to say that we should not make any effort to prepare for tomorrow? No. Not at all. But he did go on in that address to say that the best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm,on doing today’s work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.”

What about you, are you living in daytight compartments?

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