In a letter to Isabel Standen, a young friend of his, the author of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has some wise advice to impart on
how to deal with changing conditions:
I can quite understand, and much sympathise with, what you say of your
feeling lonely, and not what you can honestly call ‘happy’. Now I am going to
give you a bit of philosophy about that – my own experience is that every new
form of life we try is, just at first, irksome rather than pleasant. My first day or
two at the sea is a little depressing; I miss the Christ Church interests, and
haven’t taken up the threads of interest here; and, just in the same way, my
first day or two, when I get back to Christ Church, I miss the seaside
pleasures, and feel with unusual clearness the bothers of business-routine. In
all such cases, the true philosophy, I believe, is ‘wait a bit.’ Our mental nerves
seem to be so adjusted that we feel first and most keenly, the dis-comforts of
any new form of life; but, after a bit, we get used to them, and cease to notice
them; and then we have time to realise the enjoyable features, which at first
we were too much worried to be conscious of.
Suppose you hurt your arm, and had to wear it in a sling for a month. For the
first two or three days the discomfort of the bandage, the pressure of the sling
on the neck and shoulder, the being unable to use the arm, would be a constant
worry. You would feel as if all comfort in life were gone; after a couple of days
you would be used to the new sensations, after a week you perhaps wouldn’t
notice them at all; and life would seem just as comfortable as ever.
So my advice is, don’t think about loneliness, or happiness, or unhappiness,
for a week or two. Then ‘take stock’ again, and compare your feelings with
what they were two weeks previously. If they have changed, even a little, for
the better you are on the right track; if not, we may begin to suspect the life
does not suit you. But what I want specially to urge is that there’s no use in
comparing one’s feelings between one day and the next; you must allow a
reasonable interval, for the direction of change to show itself.
Sit on the beach, and watch the waves for a few seconds; you say ‘the tide is
coming in’; watch half a dozen successive waves, and you may say ‘the last is
the lowest; it is going out.’ Wait a quarter of an hour, and compare its average
place with what it was at first, and you will say ‘No, it is coming in after all.’
With love, I am always affectionately yours...
Excerpt taken from To Read Aloud by Francesco Dimitri (Head of Zeus)
TO READ ALOUD...
Try reading this short extract from The Life and Letters of Lewis
Carroll, it will resonate with anybody who is coping with change
Reading time: 4 minutes.
»
