Boldness

My father, Otis Skinner, was a highly successful director as well as actor. When directing, he had one peice of advice to pass on to the nervous player. "Take the pins out of your diaphram, my friend," he would say, "and start brathing!" This always had the instant effect of loosening the jittery actor's tension of voice and body and easing him into a freer and bettter premformance. 
        Father once gave me similar advice, if under dissimilar circumstances. I was twenty three and going through a trying period of introspection and immature gloom. my attitude of "Oh, the pain of it all!" was an acute pain in the neck to my familly. Father put up with me for a time. Then one day while we were taking a long walk in the country, he shook me out of my Byronic miasma with an amoused but understanding "Take the pins out of your diaphram, kid, and start living!" 
       I can't say that I started living just then, but his words gave me a sudden new perspective of myself. A sorry sight it was: a youthful egotist so tensed up in self-absorption she had ceased to breathe deeply of the life around her. 
         Even today the advice holds good today. God knows, these are days of tension for everyone. But we are all too prone to fight tension withh further tensions, senseless distractions, inncessant entertainment, the obsession of keeping busy--often with activities of little value. or we resort to an ostrich head-in-the-sand negation with liquor, easy love affairs and the latest brand of traquilizer--anything to avoid an ever deepening awareness of being alive.
         Life isn't easy, but in the long run it's easier than going to elaborate ends to deny it.  We might do worse than "take the pins out of our diaphragms and start living."




  

At every crossway on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us have no fear lest the fair towers of former days be sufficiently defended. The least that the most timid among us can do is not to add to the immense dead weight which nature drags along.

Let us not say to ourselves that the best truth always lies in moderation, in the decent average. This would perhaps be so if the majority of men did not think on a much lower plane than is needful. That is why it behooves others to think and hope on a higher plane than seems reasonable. The average, the decent moderation of today, will be the least human of things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the other good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.

Let us think of the great invisible ship that carries our human destinies upon eternity. Like the vessels of our confined oceans, she has her sails and her ballast. The fear that she may pitch or roll on leaving the roadstead is no reason for increasing the weight of the ballast by stowing the fair white sails in the depths of the hold. Sails were not woven to molder side by side with cobblestones in the dark. Ballast exists everywhere; all the pebbles of the harbor, all the sand of the beach, will serve for that. But sails are rare and precious things; their place is not in the murk of the well, but amid the light of the tall masts, where they will collect the winds of space.