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About Omaha daily bee. (Omaha [Neb.]) 187?-1922 | View Entire Issue (Dec. 12, 1920)
I , 'S THE OMAHA SUNDAY BEE; DECEMBER 12, 1920 11 A' Concentrating H J I t By James J. Montague. s., I had been reading one of those Editorials which tell you how to suc ceed. yThe way to succeed, the edi torial said, was to concentrate. If I ' ; could shut all distractions out of my mind, and devote it, exclusively ;to the thing I was doing, I should get it done. If I got everything done ' V. 1 was trying Mo do, provided they I V wer all good useful things, I shoulf succeed. It struck me that there was a good ' deal in that editorial. It stood to reason that distractions were dis turbers of , mental traffic. If somebody had fushed in just as Eli Whitney was groping around for the idea of the cotton gin and told , him he hadMeen summoned for jury duty, he probably would have lost the idea, and the average suit of all- ,wool clothes would still be selling for around $350. If when Sifalsaac Newton was still rubbing hiswad where the falling 1 apple had hit it, the bulldog belong ing to the orchard had stepped out and frowned at him, we should still see nothing remarkable, in the fact that balloons go up instead of down. " If when James Watt but I had . proved my own point. Concentra ' ton was a great thing. ( $o thereafter I tried to concen ' trate. But it wasn't ha4f so easy as it sounded. I began to wonder how the man who wrote theditorial had learne.dto do it. ' After I had prac ticed it for a week without getting the swing, I began to wonder if he ever had learned it,' and was about to write and ask him, when another of his editorials on the same sub ject came along. nrt f spflllpl to the first one a second lesson so to I '"speak. It admitted that concentra tion wasn't acquired without a strug gle, and advised people who hadnt any- gift for it to concentrate arti ficially, which is to say to shut out distractions by doors and boltsior a while, until it began to come natural. That sounded, to' me like -; good common sense. So I went home, to try it. ' Chance for a TryoutN Just at that particular time' I was trying to make the amounts on the stubs of my check book agree with the amouitt the bank said I had checked out of my deposit account. It was hard work, for I am one of those men vho can add the same column of figures three times and get a fresh and surprising answer every time. I probably would get still more fresh and surprising j answers after subsequent additions, but I never had the patience to add the column more than three times. , It struck me thatMiere -was a chance for a test of the concentra tion theory. If by concentration, however induced, 1 could make my own figures and those of the bank agree, it would prove that I could concentrate. After that success ' would be mine with practically no trouble at all. So, taking 'my check book, my fountain pen, and a pad of scratch paper I retired to an attic room and began to concentrate. I was ' getting along fine when the teleohone bell, rang. i l hmtcing ot course someDoay down stairs would answer it, I con tinued to concentrate. But they didn't answer it. Jt rang again three short rings this time. There was a pause. I sat back and waited. Perhaps central would give it up and tell whoever was calling that the party didn't answer, or that, the line was out of order. But she didn't. She rang again. She rang for 18 seconds, which is a very long time. Still nobody answered, although I could hear them moving about downstairs. Followed a silence. I had long ceased to concentrate by this time, and had 4eaun to wonder if the telephone message might not be im portant. The more I wondered the more I thought it might be. At last, able to endure the suspense no long er, I slammed down.rtte check book and started down the stairs. When I got to the telephone I found a man there. He was from the tele phone cbmpany. He was making central ring the bell to see if it worked all right. I could have told him that, and I wouldn't have needed the aid of concentration to help me work out the answer, either. l went back upstairs and re sumed my rabors. There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth below stairs three minutes after 1 started. The baby had Tommy's foot ball and wouldn,give it up. ' ' I got the foot ball, propitiated the baby with a lump of sugar, warned both children that I was concen trating, and went back upstairs. Silence is Disturbing. fnen there came a knock on the back door. It was a gentle knock at first. Then it, became bolder. No body answered it. The head of the 1 house must have gone out. Tommy and the baby , were probably on the front porch, where thejr couldn't hear .it. . , If the knock had continued I could have'kept on concentrating perhaps, but it didn t. It stopped. And I began to fear that it was some porch climber1 who had; merely knocked to assure himself that no tody was in the house. Doubtless now he was at work on one of the hack porch windows with a jimmy. I went downstairs and found lady who-wanted to know if we had M a vacuum cleaner. - I told her we had and went,back upstairs. Once more I got out the pen, and ' bent over my task. Then a motor car drove up to the front gate. stopped, and the horn began to blow violently. I gathered up the check book and the fountain pen' and the paper pad and went downstairs. have not concentrated since then, and am placed m solitary confine ment as the result . ' Copyright, 1S20. by th. Bell Syndicate, Ine. r- i n ni i mimrn m. ..i Wife Prefers Prison Cell To Her Husband's Home Westfield, Mass., Dec. 11. Of fered the choice between two years in the House of the Good Shepherd and returning to her husband, Jen- me Kogalski, 17 years old, chose the cell. - - "I would rather SDend 100 vears . in the House of Good SheDherd 'than one day with that man," she told the court, which a short time before had tried her for foreerv. 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