You can pray, sing, play, work, think, rest, hope; you can be well or ill, rich or poor and still be pleasant to live with.
[Sidenote: Pleasantness a Tonic Quality.]
Being pleasant helps you to be strong in body and mind, and it keeps you young a long time. It"s good medicine; I know it. My little motto, "Be pleasant every morning until ten o"clock, the rest of the day will take care of itself," has brought sunshine into many homes.
If you frown it will soon get to be a habit--and give you a heavy heart.
If you smile your face will be attractive, no matter how unlucky you were in the lottery of beauty.
Be pleasant and you will never feel old. The pleasant disposition is a sure route to happy land and happy homes.
Old Ponce de Leon lost out in searching for the fountain of youth. If he had been pleasant, he would have kept the smiles on his wife"s face and there would have been no excuse to leave her to find the mythical fountain.
Hoe cake, bacon and smiles beat lobster, champagne and frowns.
Our land is thrice blessed with its peaceful, happy homes--for "happy homes are the strength of a nation."
Be pleasant in your home. Make the children feel home is the pleasantest place in the world.
Every act and example is written in the child"s memory tablet. Let your hours with the children be loving, laughing, living hours. Pat them on the head, joke with them, whisper affection, express love to them. Those acts will be remembered in all their years to come, for you are planting everlasting plants that may pa.s.s on to a hundred generations and make children happy a thousand years from now.
[Sidenote: Cheerfulness Its Own Reward.]
Be pleasant to live with and you will have more pleasant things to live for. There will be kindnesses, kisses, beauty, health, peace, fun, happiness and content coming your way all along the great big road of life you are traveling.
Be pleasant to live with and the people will turn to you as you pa.s.s and reflect your cheerfulness like the sunflowers turn to face the sun.
Be pleasant; don"t be cross and crabbed because someone else in the household is not pleasant. Do your part; you will likely thereby cure the frown habit on the face of the unfortunate disturber of your peace.
Make yourself right before you criticise your life partner. Answer this question, "Am I pleasant to live with?"
Don"t fool yourself in the matter. Get right down to bra.s.s tacks with yourself, watch your moves and acts and att.i.tude for ten days carefully before answering the question.
If your answer is no, now is your time to change your att.i.tude and try the pleasant plan, and here is my blessing and good wishes in such an event.
5.
There is fun and interest and diversion all around us. All we need is keen observation and we will see much that pa.s.ses unnoticed to the preoccupied person.
What an interesting thing is the great round world we live in! The people are as interesting as fish in an aquarium.
[Sidenote: Sitting on the Side Lines.]
See the rushing, surging crowd. Man pushes along searching for necessary things to be done; he builds cities, harnesses rivers, makes ships to sail the seas to the uttermost parts of the earth. Man goes to war, he builds death-dealing devices that destroy in a few minutes a beautiful cathedral which has taken centuries to build.
Man makes the desert blossom like a rose.
Here is the scientist in his laboratory, trying to unite certain elements to produce new substance. Here is the beauty in her silken nest; here the lover; there the musician; yonder the peanut man, and in the office building is the captain of industry--all busy bees deeply absorbed in their respective interests, and intoxicated in the belief that they are important and greatly necessary.
Yet in the broad measure of ages they are mere ripples on the sea of time, faint bubbles on the eternal deep, and grains of sand at the mountain foot.
Great man by his own measure--minute man by the great measure of time.
Mammoths to the near-sighted--mites to the far-sighted. Hustle and bustle, crowd and push. They tramp down the weaker brothers in the mad race after the golden shekels, which are only measures of the ability to buy and own material things; symbols of power to make others serve you.
These golden shekels which men fret, sweat and fight for, can only buy physical and material things.
[Sidenote: A Great Truth.]
Away from the crowd is the little group who have learned a great truth, which is that happiness is not to be bought with gold. This little minority knows that mental pleasures are best, and that mental pleasures cannot be found on the great highway of material conquest.
The puffy, corn-fed millionaire pities the man who is content to live with small means and enjoy what he has to the full extent.
[Sidenote: Real Happiness.]
The wise man is he who gets fullness out of life--happiness, respect, content, freedom from worry; who is busy doing useful things--busy helping his brother, busy training his children, busy spreading sunshine and love and the close-together feeling in his home circle.
The corn-fed, hardened, senseless, money-mad, dollar-worshipper knows not peace. Smiles seldom linger on his lips. Peace never rests in his bosom, cheer never lights his face. He is simply a fighting machine, miserable in solitude, suffering when inactive and sick when resting.
The money-chaser is up and doing, working like a Trojan, because occupation takes his mind off the painful picture of his misspent opportunity and his destroyed natural instinct. When fighting for gold he forgets his appalling poverty in the really worth-while things in the world.
Like the drunkard in his cups, the intoxication makes him forget, and he is negatively happy.
Money received as reward for doing things worth-while is laudable.
We cannot sit idly by and neglect to earn money to provide food, shelter and education for our loved ones, but between times we should seek the wealth that comes from right mental employment.
The millionaire thinks, dreams and gets dollars, and that is all.
The worth-while man thinks kindness, usefulness, self-improvement, brotherhood, love and he gets happiness.
[Sidenote: Doing for Others.]
The man who discovers means to help his fellow man, does a good act, but is the man with the dollars in front of his eyes who commercializes the discovery and invention. In the end, the man that helped mankind fares better than the man who made the millions.
It"s a great crowd surging by, and very few have the good sense to learn the value of TO-DAY. That great crowd I see below my window thinks ever of to-morrow and forgets the wondrous opportunities that to-day holds out.
Those who think always of to-morrow will never get the beauties and joys from life that comes to the little group of To-day, who appreciates and enjoys the real Now, rather than the pictured To-morrow that never comes.
It"s mighty interesting to sit on the side lines and watch the crowds go by and speculate on their movements.
[Sidenote: The Road to Disillusionment.]
Save up your pennies, measure everything by the dollar standard, think dollars, dream dollars, work, slave, push for the dollars and you will build a fortune. You will never have peace or recreation or joy; you will live only in hope of a some day when you will retire. That"s the way the millionaires travel life"s highway.
Some day the paper will announce the death of those millionaires, and then the dollars will be blown in by reckless heirs, and so the grinding wheels roll on.
Surely there are many ways of looking at things. Surely there is much of interest in the crowd. Surely there is an unending amount of thought and speculation possible about that crowd way down on the street below my window.