Live It Down

Dear Boo and Bubble,

I don’t know what it is about human nature that makes us incapable of dealing with nagging situations.  You’re too young to know about them, but they are the annoying circumstances in life that keep us awake at night; or cause us lack of enjoyment in otherwise fulfilling endeavors; or carry on as background noise to our consciousness as we go through the day.  They are like gnats who don’t respond to swatting or that splinter in your finger where your entire body feels fine, yet the only thing you can think about is the pain from the splinter.  No matter what you logically tell yourself, you can’t get it out of your head.  The little gremlin sits there on your shoulder until either enough time passes and it fades away or something specific occurs to solve the problem.

There’s someone that I know and love who is in the midst of such a state.  I wish I could wave a magic wand and make it go away, but that’s not going to happen.  All I can do is offer encouragement and advice drawn from my own experiences.  As so often is the case anymore, I went to the scrapbooks of your great, great, great, great grandfather Joseph B. Cottrell in order to find some nugget of guidance to pass along.  He never fails. 

This time, what emerged did not come from his pen, but from that of poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox.  It’s a work entitle “Live It Down.”  The third verse is particularly apropos, I think.

Has your life a bitter sorrow

   Live it down.

Think about a bright tomorrow,

  Live it down.

You will find it never pays

Just to sit, wet-eyed and gaze

On the grave of vanished days.

  Live it down.

Is disgrace your galling burden?

  Live it down.

You can win a brave hearts guerdon;

  Live it down.

Make your life so free from blame,

That the luster of your fame

Shall hide all the oden shame;

 Live it down.

Has your heart a secret trouble?

  Live it down.

Useless griefs will make it double.

  Live it down.

Do not water it with tears –

Do not feed it with your fears –

Do not nurse it through the years –

  Live it down.

Have you made some awful error?

  Live it down.

Do not hide your face in terror.

  Live it down.

Look the world square in the eyes;

Go ahead as one who tries;

To be honored ere he dies.

  Live it down.

(As an ironic aside – for years on our sailboat “Up Jinks,” we had a portion of another Ella Wheeler Wilcox poem hanging on the wall entering the salon.  I equally love its message and it goes like this:

One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
'Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.

Like the winds of the sea
Are the waves of time,
As we journey along through life,
'Tis the set of the soul,
That determines the goal,
And not the calm or the strife.)