3.
Worry can make even the most strong-willed person ill. General Grant discovered that during the closing days of the American Civil War (1861-1865). The story goes like this: Grant had been besieging (包围) Richmond, Virginia, for nine months.
Richmond
served as the capital of the Confederate States of
America
, which supported slavery and wanted to separate from the
United States of America
. The Confederate States Army, led by General Lee, was beaten. The soldiers were hungry. Many of them ran away from the city at night. The end was close.
Grant, half blind with a violent sick headache, fell behind his army and stopped at a farmhouse. “I spent the night,” he records in his memoirs (传记), “in bathing my feet in hot water and putting mustard plasters (芥子膏) on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning.”
The next morning, he was cured instantaneously. And the thing that cured him was not a mustard plaster, but a horseman riding down the road with a letter from Lee, saying he wanted to stop fighting.
“When the officer bearing the message reached me,” Grant wrote, “I was still suffering with the sick headache, but the instant I saw the things written in the note, I was cured.”
Obviously it was Grant's worries, tensions, and emotions that made him ill. He was cured instantly the moment he saw the sure signs of victory.
To learn more about the negative effects of worry, you may find an influential book about it in your public library. The book is Man Against Himself by Dr. Karl Menninger. Dr. Menninger's book will not give you any rules about how to avoid worry, but it will offer you true facts about how we destroy our bodies and minds by anxiety, frustration, hatred, anger, and fear.