Time & Perspective Quote by Edward Everett Hale

Hale is preaching thrift, but not of money: of attention. The line reads like a friendly scold from a 19th-century pulpit, where moral instruction had to compete with daily grind and quiet dread. As a clergyman, he understands that worry is rarely just a private quirk; it is a habit that masquerades as responsibility. By framing anxiety as "bearing" trouble, he makes it physical labor, a self-imposed burden you can choose to set down.

The craft here is in the inventory. Past, present, future: a neat little ledger of suffering that feels almost comic in its arithmetic. That humor is the bait. It disarms the listener before delivering the sharper claim underneath: people often treat pain like proof of virtue, stacking it up to demonstrate seriousness. Hale punctures that performance. The future trouble is especially telling because it exposes the ego in anxiety: the belief that imagining every worst case is a form of control, or even foresight.

Context matters. Hale lived through national upheaval (including the Civil War era) and the rise of industrial pace, when modern stress began to feel like a civic condition. His advice is not denial; it is triage. "One kind of trouble at a time" is a spiritual discipline and an early cognitive strategy: separate what is real and actionable from what is remembered or rehearsed. The subtext is pastoral: God may not remove hardship, but you are not obliged to multiply it in your own mind.