Introduction
Introduction
MY PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
I have had what people call a hard life. I have been through the depths of poverty and sickness. I have known want and struggle and anxiety and despair. I have always had to work beyond the limit of my strength.
As I look back upon my life, I see it as a battlefield strewn with the wrecks of dead dreams and broken hopes and shattered illusions—a battle in which I always fought with the odds tremendously against me, and which has left me scarred and bruised and maimed and old before my time.
Yet I have no pity for myself; no tears to shed over the past and gone sorrows; no envy for the women who have been spared all that I have gone through.
For I have lived. They have only existed. I have drunk the cup of life down to the very dregs. They have only sipped at the bubbles on the top of it.
I know things they will never know. I see things to which they are blind. It is only the women whose eyes have been washed clear with tears who get the broad vision that makes them little sisters to all the world.
This of itself is a compensation for many sorrows, but I have more. I have proved myself to myself. I know that I have the strength to endure and the courage to carry on, and that I will not be craven enough to run up the white flag, no matter what other difficulties I may be called upon to meet.
The skeleton at the feast of the woman who has always been happy and prosperous is fear. She becomes panic-stricken when she thinks that she may be called upon to meet trouble; that she may have hardships to endure; that her soul may be torn with suffering. She suffers with apprehension at the thought of poverty, and wonders how she could endure to go shabby and do without the things to which she is accustomed. She wonders helplessly what she would do if she had to earn her own living.
I am not afraid of poverty because I have been poor and I know that poverty has its consolations and brings you pleasures that money cannot buy. Nor am I afraid to support myself. I have earned my bread and butter for many years. I know the joy of work and I know that to a woman, just the satisfaction of knowing that she is self-supporting turns her crust into angel’s food.
None of the fears with which happy women torture themselves upon occasion have any terrors for me. I know them for the bogies they are, and know, too, that they fly away before the person who does not cringe before them.
Often I am tempted to envy the woman who has always had some strong man to stand between her and the world, some man whose tenderness and love has guarded and protected her. But I am consoled for not being a clinging vine when I wonder what the vine would do and think how broken it would be if the sturdy oak on which it hangs were laid low.
I have learned in the great University of Hard Knocks a philosophy that no woman who has had an easy life ever acquires. I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading to-morrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us. I put that dread from me because experience has taught me that when the time comes that I so fear, the strength and wisdom to meet it will be given me.
Little annoyances have no longer the power to affect me. After you have seen your whole edifice of happiness topple and crash in ruins about you, it never matters to you again that a servant forgets to put the doilies under the finger bowls or the cook spills the soup.
I have learned not to expect too much of people and so I can still get happiness out of the friend who isn’t quite true to me, or the acquaintance who gossips about me, and I can even find pleasure in the society of those whose motives I see through.
Above all I have acquired a sense of humor, because there were so many things over which I had either to laugh or cry. And when a woman can joke over her troubles instead of having hysterics, nothing can ever hurt her much again.
So I do not regret the hardships I have known because through them I have touched life at every point. I have lived. And it was worth the price I had to pay.
Dorothy Dix.