not abide with low ideals, with selfishness, idleness, and discord. It is a friend of harmony; of truth and beauty; of affection and simplicity.
Multitudes of men have made fortunes, but have murdered their capacity for enjoyment in the process. How often we hear the remark, “He has the money, but cannot enjoy it.”
A man can have no greater delusion than that he can spend the best years of his life coining all of his energies into dollars, neglecting his home, sacrificing friendships, self-improvement, and everything else that is really worth while, for money, and yet find happiness at the end!
If a man coins his ability, his opportunities into dollars, and during all the years he is accumulating wealth neglects the cultivation of the only faculties which are capable of appreciating the highest happiness, he cannot effectively revive his atrophied brain cells. His enjoyment, after he makes his money, must come from the exercise of the same faculties which he has employed in making it. He cannot undo the results of a life habit after he retires from business.
If you have not kept alive your ability to appreciate the beautiful, the good, and the true, you will be as surprised to find that it has left you as Darwin was when, in middle life, he discovered all at once that he had lost his power to appreciate Shakespeare and music.
We ought to be able to get a good living, even to make fortunes, and yet have a jolly good time every day of our lives. This idea of being a slave most of the time, and of only occasionally enjoying a holiday, is all wrong. Every day should be a holiday, a day of joy and gladness, a day of supreme happiness; and it would be, if we lived sanely, if we knew the secret of right thinking and normal living.
Isn’t it strange that so few people ever think of making happiness a daily duty; that they should put this everlasting emphasis upon their vocations, on money making, and let the thing for which they really live come incidentally or without planning? The making of a life should be emphasized infinitely more than the making of a living.
Few people ever learn the art of enjoying the little things of life as they go along. Yet it is the little, everyday enjoyments and satisfactions that count most in a lifetime. Almost every person I know is living in anticipation, not in reality. He is not actually living the life he has always looked forward to, or expected to attain; but is just getting ready to live, just getting ready to enjoy it. When he gets a little more money, a little better house, a little more of the comforts of life, a little more leisure, a little more freedom from responsibility, he will then be ready to enjoy life.
It is a rare thing to find a person who can truthfully say: “I am really living. This is the life I have been striving for, the life that I have looked forward to as being as near my ideal as I am likely to find in this world.”
It is a great thing so to cultivate the art of happiness that we can get pleasure out of the common experiences of every day. The happiness habit is just as necessary to our best welfare as the work habit, or the honesty or square-dealing habit.
No one can do his best, his highest work, who is not perfectly normal, and happiness is a fundamental necessity of our being. It is an indication of health, of sanity, of harmony. The opposite is a symptom of disease, of abnormality. There are plenty of evidences in the human economy that we were intended for happiness, that it is our normal condition; that suffering, unhappiness, discontent, are absolutely foreign and abnormal to our natures.
There is no doubt that our life was intended to be one grand, sweet song. We are built upon the plan of Harmony, and every form of discord is abnormal. There is something wrong when any human being in this world, tuned to infinite harmonies and beauties that are unspeakable, is unhappy and discontented.
One of the most inexplicable mysteries that has ever puzzled the selfish rich is their failure to find happiness where they had expected to find it. The bitterest disappointment that comes to people who have made fortunes is that the wealth did not bring the happiness which it promised, or anything like it. They find that the affections do not feed on material things, that the heart would starve in the midst of the greatest luxuries alone. They find that, while money can do many things, it has little power to satisfy the heart yearnings, the heart hunger. How many women there are in palatial homes in this country who are starving for happiness and who would gladly exchange all their luxuries for the love of a good man, even if he had not a dollar in the world!
No selfish life can ever be happy. I am acquainted with a self-made man who has made a fortune, who ‘tells me that the greatest enigma and disappointment of his life lie in the fact that, although he has made millions, he is not happy. He says that somehow he has never been able to make many friends; that people avoid him; that he has never been able to get the confidence of others to any very great extent, and that he is not popular even among his own neighbors. He cannot understand why he is not happy, for, he tells me, he has tried very hard to find happiness.
The trouble with him is that he has always done everything with reference to himself. He did not mean to be selfish; but the whole passion of his life has been to make money, because he thought that would bring everything else that is desirable. He has chosen his friends for their ability to advance his interests, and has considered every step in life with reference to the effect it would have upon him. “What is there in it for me?” seems to have been the interrogation point in his life.
Now, happiness is a reflection, an echo, a part of what we do and think. It does not depend upon our material possessions. Thoreau’s cabin, at Walden Pond, cost only thirty-one dollars, and yet Thoreau was rich and happy because he had a rich mind.
It is as impossible for the selfish, greedy, grasping thought, the thought always centered upon one's own interest, to produce a happy state of mind as it is for thistle seeds to produce wheat. But if we sow helpfulness, kindness, unselfishness, we shall reap a harvest of satisfaction, harmony, and happiness. Selfishness and real happiness never go together. They are fatally antagonistic.
An inordinate ambition, a desire to get ahead of others, a mania to keep up appearances at all hazards, whether we can afford it or not, all these things feed selfishness, that corrosive acid which eats away our possible enjoyment and destroys the very sources of happiness. The devouring ambition to get ahead of others in money making, to outshine others socially, develops a sordid, grasping disposition which is the bane of happiness. No man with greed developed big within him can be happy. Neither contentment, satisfaction, serenity, affection, nor any other member of the happiness family can exist in the presence of greed.
It is as impossible for a man who has been dishonest, who has gotten his wealth by crushing others, and by taking advantage of them, to be happy as it is for a person really to enjoy himself while walking with pebbles in his shoes, or while constantly being nettled with pin pricks.
No man can be happy who is conscious of being a drone, of shirking his share in the great world’s work, who knows that he is taking all the good things he can get hold of in life’s great granary, put there by the toilers, and is putting nothing back.
A debauched mind that has departed from the principles of right thinking and right living has incapacitated itself for real enjoyment.
The only way to get the happiness that is worth while is to live a straight, clean, pure, honest, useful life. There is no power in the universe that can make a human being happy along any other lines.
Straightforward, honest work, a determined endeavor to do one’s best, an earnest desire to scatter flowers instead of thorns, to make other people a little better off, a little happier because of our existence, these are the only recipes for real happiness.
No man can be happy when he despises his own acts, when he has any consciousness of wrong, whether of motive or act. No man can be happy when he harbors thoughts
