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Chapter 8 - FORGET IT. - p. 34

Why worry about the past? --- Hugging old sorrows to your bosom --- What to do with them --- Don't poison your life --- Pain brings experience --Learning your lesson --- How to get rid of a gloomy thought --- Throw it away --- Forget it.

One can often get some useful lesson from the slang and current phrases of the day. There is* something particularly attractive to me about slang, and the pat phrases that are passed along from one to another on the streets. Many of these phrases condense in a few words certain practical truths that one could use as a basis for a sermon, an essay, or even a book. They are the practical experiences of the people crystallized in a catchy phrase. The phrase which I hear so frequently on the street just now, "Forget it," seems to me to contain much practical common sense, and if people would put it into practice there would be many more brighter faces --- many more lighter hearts. What's the use, anyhow, of carrying around a long face or a heavy heart, just because away back in the past, something "went wrong" with us, or even if we "went wrong" ourselves (and most of us have --- I have, I know)? What's 'the use? Forget it!

Of course you will not forget the experiences of the past, and you do not want to. That's one of the things we are living for --gaining experience. When we have once really learned a thing through experience, we never forget it --- it is a part of us. But why bother about the memory of the pain, the mortification, the "slip-up," the heartache, the wounded feelings, the misplaced confidence, the thing done in the wrong way, the chance you let slip by, the folly, the sin, the misery, the "might-have-beens," and all the rest. Oh what's the use? Forget it I say, forget it.

If one is to worry about all the things that went wrong --- all the things that didn't come right --- in the past; if he has to take out each memory every day, and after carefully dusting it off, fondle and caress it, and hug it close to his bosom; if he has to raise up these ghosts from the past --- these phantoms of long ago --- these musty, moth-eaten things --- why he will have no time for the affairs of to-day. He will lose all the joy of the now --- all the pleasure of life of the moment --- all the interest in the things of to-day. Oh, dear, dear, what's the use? Forget it --- forget it.

Some people are not happy unless they have some old faded sorrow hugged up close to their bosoms, and they feel guilty if they happen to smile and forget the old thing for even a moment. Oh, how they do gloat over their own revamped unhappiness --how they enjoy the relieving of the pains and sorrows, mistakes and ignorance of years gone by. How they love to hold the fox