When the world is right

One of my favorite stories goes like so: A father was trying to relax on a lazy Sunday morning, but as sipped his coffee and read the newspaper his rambunctious young son kept pestering him for attention.

One page of the newspaper has a large ad that featured an image of the globe. So the father ripped out this page, and then ripped the page into a number of pieces.

He handed the pieces to his kid.

“Here,” said father to son, “is a puzzle for you to put together.” He figured that would keep the kid quiet for a long time, given that the kid was too young to have studied geography yet.

So the father was surprised when, just 10 minutes later, the kid presented him with the paper taped together, and the globe had been correctly reconstituted.

“How did you figure that out?” asked the father.

“Well, the other side of the page had what looked like a man on it,” the son answered, “and, though I don’t know the details about the globe, I know what a person looks like. So I put together the side with the person, since I know that if the man is right, the world is right.”

That tale came to me from W. Clement Stone (who was a famous and wealthy insurance magnate when I was a kid). I heard him speak in my church when I was really young. He was co-author of one of my favorite books, Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude. The book was copyrighted before I was born, but Mr. Stone was a very big deal where I lived. Not that my attitude is worth a darn, but, well, my lousy attitude doesn’t dilute the virtue of the tale.

The same advice came in more succinct terms from Descartes: “Conquer yourself, not the world.”

No matter which flavor of this wisdom you prefer, I’ll admit that it’s not fashionable. These days, we’re supposed to worry ourselves into neurosis by inventing dictates about how the entire world should behave. But I’m with Messrs. Stone and Descartes on this one. There’s nothing I can do about fixing the world, so I might as well invest my efforts into trying to fix up myself.

Since I secretly suspect that I’m a slug by nature, Mr. Stone’s motivational advice was often the critical motivator behind me getting off my lazy, daydreaming duff and actually getting things done. Eventually, I held enough promise that my mother decided they might just make a presentable gentlemen out of me yet, my slug-like nature having been masked by my devotion to Mr. Stone’s wisdom, and she enrolled me in social dancing school. I was junior high school age.

Social dancing wasn’t as horrible as it sounds, really. A coat and tie bugged me less then than it does now. It was sort of like a boot camp for manners, and though I was, at the time, the absolute worst right wing on my ice hockey team, I still maintained the minimal grace not to stomp on anyone’s foot.

The class spanned two years. During the second year, one of the girls who I took a liking to told me that her mother wanted to meet me. Her mom then invited me out for ice cream, so the three of us strolled to the ice cream place and everyone had a chat. I sort of felt like an amoeba under a microscope, but the lady was actually very nice, and the third degree was tactful.

It turns out that the lady was none other than Donna Stone, Mr. Stone’s daughter, and a noted philanthropist in her own right (and she was a real philanthropist, not some snotty ice queen). So, I dated her daughter, which is to say, Mr. Stone’s grand daughter (adopted, actually) and eventually wound up getting an invitation to Mr. Stone’s estate for dinner. He was already an idol of mine, and I worried myself sick over the big event and gave myself a stomach aches for a week. But Mr. Stone was so charming that dinner was, in spite of my initial nerves, very pleasant.

Anyway, I seldom pull his book from its nook, since it’s very old and the pages are falling out. But today seemed like a good time to take a look at it. I don’t know why.

Just because, I guess.

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