“Years ago,” a friend told me once, “I used to take all my troubles to bed with me. I would lie there in the darkness with closed eyes, fretting and worrying all the time. I tossed and turned from one side of the bed to the other, as wide awake as at broad noon. As life went on, the habit grew upon me until it threatened to undermine my health. Then, one night, things reached a crisis. I could not sleep, so I rose from my bed and sat at the open window. The garden below and the fields were flooded in silvery moonlight. Not a breath of wind was stirring; the intense stillness was positively uncanny. The perfect tranquility mocked the surging tumult of my brain. How quiet the room seemed! And I had entered it—for what? My behavior seemed absurd in the extreme. Nature had wrapped around me her infinite calm; and here I was allowing all the worries of the world to fever my brain and break upon my rest! Why had I locked the office door so carefully if I wished all the ledgers and day books and order-forms to follow me home? Why had I closed the bedroom door so carefully if I wished all the cares of life to follow me in? I knelt down there at the window sill, with the delicious air of the still night caressing my face, and I then and there asked God to forgive me. And since then, when I've shut a door, I've shut a door!'F. W.Boreham, The Silver Shadow, pp110-11.
Image: “when I've shut a door, I've shut a door!”
