Yesternight I didn’t sleep soundly thanks to some din that was emanating from a neighbour’s house on the 1st floor. And I stay on the 3rd floor. Maybe they were celebrating the New Year or so. I don’t know.
What I know is that I have always been bothered by any kind of din that penetrates the walls of my house from outside. Strangely enough, I can withstand and tune out completely any kind of noise elsewhere. For example, whenever I travel to Nairobi, I use Super Metro, and as any fan of these Matatus can attest, they are the loudest! Yet I always tune out their loud music and manage to read books and even take 30-40mins naps, notwithstanding the noise.
I don’t understand what kind of condition it is that afflicts me. That I can be affected by noise in one setting and not in another? Maybe there are psychological undertones to this affliction. I don’t know. Is there any device that once switched on can attenuate (or cancel) all and any noise or sound? I have been trying to research that.Click here
I have tried to look for a solution to this affliction, and then I remember reading a similar story in “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie”. I recommend this book in its entirety. I think I have found a solution to this and similar afflictions? It’s a trifle and annoyance.
Here is the story as narrated by Dale Carnegie
“Much of the time, all we need to overcome the annoyance of trifles is to affect a shifting of emphasis-set up a new and pleasurable, point of view in the mind. My friend Homer Croy, who wrote They Had to See Paris and a dozen other books, gives a wonderful example of how this can be done. He used to be driven half crazy, while working on a book, by the rattling of the radiators in his New York apartment. The steam would bang and sizzle-and he would sizzle with irritation as he sat at his desk. “Then,” says Homer Croy, “I went with some friends on a camping expedition. While listening to the limbs crackling in the roaring fire, I thought how much they sounded like the crackling of the radiators. Why should I like one and hate the other? When I went home I said to myself: ‘The crackling of the limbs in the fire was a pleasant sound; the sound of the radiators is about the same-I’ll go to sleep and not worry about the noise.’
And I did. For a few days, I was conscious of the radiators, but soon I forgot all about them.
“And so it is with many petty worries. We dislike them and get into a stew, all because we exaggerate their importance. …”
Disraeli said: “Life is too short to be little.” “Those words,” said Andre Maurois in This Week magazine, “have helped me through many a painful experience: often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. … Here we are on this earth, with only a few more decades to live, and we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year’s time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worthwhile actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings. For life is too short to be little.”
Even so illustrious a figure as Rudyard Kipling forgot at times that “Life is too short to be little”. The result? He and his brother-in-law fought the most famous court battle in the history of Vermont-a battle so celebrated that a book has been written about it:
Rudyard Kipling’s Vermont Feud.
The story goes like this: Kipling married a Vermont girl, Caroline Balestier, built a lovely home in Brattleboro, Vermont; settled down and expected to spend the rest of his life there. His brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier, became Kipling’s best friend. The two of them worked and played together.
Then Kipling bought some land from Balestier, with the understanding that Balestier would be allowed to cut hay off it each season. One day, Balestier found Kipling laying out a flower garden on this hayfield. His blood boiled. He hit the ceiling. Kipling fired right back. The air over the Green Mountains of Vermont turned blue!
A few days later, when Kipling was out riding his bicycle, his brother-in-law drove a wagon and a team of horses across the road suddenly and forced Kipling to take a spill.
And Kipling the man who wrote: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you”- he lost his own head, and swore out a warrant for Balestier’s arrest. A sensational trial followed. Reporters from the big cities poured into the town. The news flashed around the world. Nothing was settled. This quarrel caused Kipling and his wife to abandon their American home for the rest of their lives. All that worry and bitterness over a mere trifle! A load of hay.
Pericles said, twenty-four centuries ago: “Come, gentlemen, we sit too long on trifles.”
We do, indeed!”
