How To Stop Worrying And Start Living

After receiving my A.B. degree at De Pauw, I took Horace Greeley's advice-only I didn't go west, I went south-west. I went down to a new country: Oklahoma. When the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Indian reservation was opened, I home-steaded a claim and opened a law office in Lawton, Oklahoma. I served in the Oklahoma State Senate for thirteen years, in the lower House of Congress for four years, and at fifty years of age, I achieved my lifelong ambition: I was elected to the United States Senate from Oklahoma. I have served in that capacity since March 4, 1927. Since Oklahoma and Indian Territories became the state of Oklahoma on November 16, 1907, I have been continuously honoured by the Democrats of my adopted state by nominations-first for State Senate, then for Congress, and later for the United States Senate.

I have told this story, not to brag about my own fleeting accomplishments, which can't possibly interest anyone else. I have told it wholly with the hope that it may give renewed courage and confidence to some poor boy who is now suffering from the worries and shyness and feeling of inferiority that devastated my life when I was wearing my father's cast-off clothes and gaiter shoes that almost dropped off my feet as I walked.

(Editor's note: It is interesting to know that Elmer Thomas, who was so ashamed of his ill-fitting clothes as a youth, was later voted the best-dressed man in the United States Senate.)

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I Lived In The Garden Of Allah

By

R.V.C. Bodley

Descendant of Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Bodleian Library, Oxford Author of Wind in the Sahara, The Messenger, and fourteen other volumes IN 1918, I turned my back on the world I had known and went to north-west Africa and lived with the Arabs in the Sahara, the Garden of Allah. I lived there seven years. I learned to speak the language of the nomads. I wore their clothes, I ate their food, and adopted their mode of life, which has changed very little during the last twenty centuries.

I became an owner of sheep and slept on the ground in the Arabs' tents. I also made a detailed study of their religion. In fact, I later wrote a book about Mohammed, entitled The Messenger.

Those seven years which I spent with these wandering shepherds were the most peaceful and contented years of my life.

I had already had a rich and varied experience: I was born of English parents in Paris; and lived in France for nine years. Later I was educated at Eton and at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Then I spent six years as a British army officer in India, where I played polo, and hunted, and explored in the Himalayas as well as doing some

?How To Stop Worrying And Start Living? By Dale Carnegie 151

soldiering. I fought through the First World War and, at its close, I was sent to the Paris Conference as an assistant military attaché. I was shocked and disappointed at what I saw there. During the four years of slaughter on the Western Front, I had believed we were fighting to save civilisation. But at the Paris Peace Conference, I saw selfish politicians laying the groundwork for the Second World War-each country grabbing all it could for itself, creating national antagonisms, and reviving the intrigues of secret diplomacy.

I was sick of war, sick of the army, sick of society. For the first time in my career, I spent sleepless nights, worrying about what I should do with my life. Lloyd George urged me to go in for politics. I was considering taking his advice when a strange thing happened, a strange thing that shaped and determined my life for the next seven years. It all came from a conversation that lasted less than two hundred seconds-a conversation with

"Ted" Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia", the most colourful and romantic figure produced by the First World War. He had lived in the desert with the Arabs and he advised me to do the same thing. At first, it sounded fantastic.