Page:The Art of Helping People Out of Trouble (1924).pdf/20

 No matter how close our neighbors, no matter how intimate our friends, we rarely appreciate the effort by which they achieve a mastery of life. This is a thing that they keep to themselves. Except in such moments of self-revelation as that in which Lafcadio Hearn found his Japanese cook, human beings truly wear the mask of happiness as an etiquette; since all the while they are engaged in a constant and relentless struggle.

For man is not born into a world made to fit him like a custom tailored suit of clothes, or a house built to order. He enters a universe that was eons old before his appearance, and that in all likelihood will continue for eons after his departure, an infinitely complex, eternally changing universe that evolves its processes unmindful of his presence. It sets the conditions. It is man who must do the fitting.

The task engrosses his every moment. He must adjust himself to the changeless laws of nature. He must adapt himself to the men and things about him. His very life at birth depends upon his ability in an instant to oxygenate his blood from the outside air instead of through the circulatory system of the mother. Within a very few hours he must learn the process of digestion.