VIIION THE ESSENTIALS OF HAPPINESS
“That’s a pleasant cemetery, isn’t it?” asked somebody of an old lady on a railroad train one day.
“I don’t know,” was the answer, “I am not looking for cemeteries. I am looking for flower-gardens; I find lots of beautiful ones, too.”
There was a whole sermon in the old lady’s remark. How often we go through life watching out for cemeteries, forgetting that flower-gardens are much more numerous as well as far saner, pleasanter and healthier. We get into such a habit of noticing the uncomfortable conditions of life and ignoring the other kind that are always so much more plenty, that we forget our mercies. A teacher once told me of a school-boy who was so optimistic in his attitude toward life that he never saw the unpleasant side of things. If he is given ten problems, and afterlaboring patiently all the morning over them, seven are incorrect, he smiles triumphantly and says, “Well, I got three of ’em right, anyhow.” Would that there were more of him!
It all depends on our view of life. Happiness is a condition of the mind; we are happy if we train ourselves to think so; not to expect too much of life or of other people, and to keep the sun shining in our heaven. On the contrary, if we allow ourselves to worry and fret, to miss the joy of little things, to lose sight of all the greatness and nobleness that come into every-day life (if only we train our eyes to see), we can easily lose the best happiness in the world, that of realizing the beauty of humility, unselfishness, good temper, right living, high standards and purity of heart that lies all around us. There are plenty of mental and moral flower-gardens on every side, if only we are not blind, if only we do not look for cemeteries.
Now, let us make up our minds whether we care to be happy all the time or not. “Why, of course we do; how foolish such a question!” Then let us see how small a matter happiness is, and then decide whether it is worth having. If your definition of happiness is an ecstasy, a deliriumof joy, a flood of emotion that shall engulf you in an occasional paroxysm, you might as well give up asking for a steady diet of happiness. But after we arrive at years of discretion we generally know that waves of delirium do not constitute pure happiness. It is not until we cease looking for impossible sustained attitudes of mind that we come to realize what happiness is. Not until we have lived long enough to accept the possibilities and let go of the impractical.
The clouds are a blessed place for our heads, but the earth is the only legitimate place in this incarnation for our feet. Antæus, you remember, who had such victory in wrestling with Hercules, was the son of earth, and it was not until Hercules succeeded in getting him off the earth and into the air that he was able to throttle him. It is very important that woman should pay a good deal of attention to her circulation to prevent her feet going to sleep or her head getting giddy.
We talk altogether too much. Hundreds of women (to estimate it modestly) chatter from the moment they open their eyes in the morning until they close them after everybody else is tiredout for the night. They cannot bear to be alone for a moment, facing the emptiness of their own hearts and brains, and so they talk, talk, talk the precious hours away, without ever saying anything. Oh, what would I give for the hours these women waste in talk that amounts to nothing but fruitless sound?
Again, we read too much. Every new volume of history, essay, science (in easy doses), bibliography, and especially of fiction, filters through our minds like water through a sieve. We take in an enormous amount of fuel, but it all goes up the intellectual chimney in smoke. Reading does no good unless it teaches us to think and gives us something new to think about. If we read so much that our intellectual powers become inoperative, to what end is it? We need to think more; and to think to any purpose we must learn to face ourselves alone. And it is only by seeking and finding our true selves that we can come into a full comprehension of what a full, wide every-day sort of thing true happiness is, and how easily it may be obtained, after all. We may have flower-gardens in our own souls, an’ we will.
Said the Rev. Dr. Burns: “To simply perpetuatelow aims, frivolous characters, mammon-worshipping beings, is to curse rather than to bless. This is not the end nor kingdom to which woman has been called. A message has gone forth—not to a favored one, but to every woman, whatever may be her position. Some are faithfully and heroically striving to obey the command; others are indifferent. They are asleep. But sleep must give place to work, indifference to interest, selfish ease to self-sacrifice. Littleness, worldliness, must all give way to the execution of the command.
“Knowest thou, O woman, that thou art come for such a time and work as this? If indifferent, thou wilt sink into insignificance and another will take up the crown and sceptre which might have been thine.” Donald Mitchell says: “Man without some sort of religion is at best a poor reprobate, a football of destiny.” But a woman without religion is worse. She is a flame without heat, a rainbow without color, a flower without perfume. That sweet trustfulness, that abiding love, that endearing hope which man needs in every scheme of life, is not then hers to give. But let the love of Christ take full possession of a woman’s heart, and under its inspiration let hergrow in purity, in character, till at last she come to a perfect woman, “to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ”; then from all human lips, and from Him who sitteth upon the throne, will come the benediction, “Blessed art thou among women.”
Man hunts after God with his understanding and fails, often, to find Him; science reaches after God with its lenses, and its face seems like a blind man trying to help his sight by using a glass eye; logic tries to soar toward God, and waves its wooden crutches in mimicry to witness; woman sees Him, feels Him within, discerns Him above, sees Him in Christ. She feels Him in the deepest experiences of life, and then she sees Him in all the providential history of the world, in all creation. It is by the heart of woman filled with the Divine power and beauty that the world is to have everywhere and retain immortally the vision of God. One of the most foolish questions ever asked is: “What is going to be the sphere of woman when she is so educated?” The sphere? If she don’t make her own we may stop prophesying. You see the little ridge among the mountains, a thread of water, and you see it arrested by rocks, and you seemore and more as it fills the chasm behind them till it cuts its way across the rock, and through the rock, and at last you go into the gorges and see the mighty chasms that have been cloven through the rocky hills, and there is the power that has done it. That little stream has made its sphere.
If we were all thoughtful, high-minded, serious, charitable, broad-minded, loving, tender, patient, self-sacrificing, forgiving and Christ-like; if we lived the best of which we are capable every day of our lives, “you in your small corner and I in mine,” what a power for good would we be!—not possibility, but power. Whose fault is it if we do not accomplish all we might?
Again, we put such false estimates on life. Lady Henry Somerset once said: “It would be interesting to analyze how much real happiness comes to the man who has made or inherited a large fortune, and feels it necessary to live in what is called ‘adequate style.’ He builds himself a palace, engages a troop of servants, begins to collect pictures, furniture and objects of art, and he little knows that he is heaping upon himself a world of trouble. A man with a moderate income, who has no requirements beyondthose which he can well supply, who lives in a house where his things give him no anxiety, but in refined, tasteful and simple surroundings, who can afford to see his own friends because he cares for them, and not a host of people who have to be asked because it is the right thing that they should be seen at his house, is the really happy man.” When shall we learn that it is not the things we possess, but the thing we are that makes or unmakes our life?
It is only in the last hundred years that we have come to judge men and women in proportion to their personal contribution to humanity. Now we see that our aim must be to live, not to make a living; that we must get our culture out of our work, instead of leaving it till we grow too old or too rich to work; that we must make our work a medium for self-expression, and finally that we must make it an opportunity for serving others. Vocations tend to become matters of such routine that it is often hard to see any ideal or inspiration in them, and this holds true of much more of women’s work than of men’s. There’s so little inspiration, so little of the outlook into the bigger world.
Again, it is so much easier to see the deadnessin your own life than in other people’s. We see their brilliant achievements; we don’t know anything about the drudgery that has gone to produce them.
This life is no lottery. Nothing worth while comes without work. What comes easily goes easily. That which seems to be done most easily is bought with the hardest work. There is no royal road to anything worth while. We have to do many things that seem like the merest drudgery; but to do any blind, dead work loyally and faithfully without protesting is to build character and to get culture. For what is culture but patience, fidelity, quiet wisdom, loyalty to trust—those simple, primitive qualities on which human life is based? And when trouble comes on us, to whom do we go? Sometimes to our physician. Sometimes to our minister. But often we go to some woman who has lived quietly and brought up her children, but is able to give us the help that comes from a hand-grip with life.
Here’s a verse for you:
“Somebody did a golden deed;Somebody proved a friend in need;Somebody sang a beautiful song;Somebody smiled the whole day long.Somebody thought, ‘’Tis sweet to live’;Somebody said ‘I’m glad to give’;Somebody fought a valiant fight;Somebody lived to shield the right;Was that somebody you?”
“Somebody did a golden deed;Somebody proved a friend in need;Somebody sang a beautiful song;Somebody smiled the whole day long.Somebody thought, ‘’Tis sweet to live’;Somebody said ‘I’m glad to give’;Somebody fought a valiant fight;Somebody lived to shield the right;Was that somebody you?”
“Somebody did a golden deed;Somebody proved a friend in need;Somebody sang a beautiful song;Somebody smiled the whole day long.Somebody thought, ‘’Tis sweet to live’;Somebody said ‘I’m glad to give’;Somebody fought a valiant fight;Somebody lived to shield the right;Was that somebody you?”
“Somebody did a golden deed;
Somebody proved a friend in need;
Somebody sang a beautiful song;
Somebody smiled the whole day long.
Somebody thought, ‘’Tis sweet to live’;
Somebody said ‘I’m glad to give’;
Somebody fought a valiant fight;
Somebody lived to shield the right;
Was that somebody you?”
“There are,” says Margaret Deland, “as many opinions of happiness as there are people in the world, but the first and most important distinction which we must make is this: happiness is a spiritual possession and is independent of material things. Happiness is thinking straight and seeing clear and having a true perception of the value of things.”
It takes us a long time to find out that happiness is a state of mind which can be cultivated rather than the result of conditions outside ourselves. The little child does not know that it is seeing its happiest days, the school-girl does not understand how happy she is, the young mother seldom realizes her own happiness; they are all looking forward with eagerness to some happiness to come. Contentment is the truest happiness, and yet if we were always simply content with our lot from babyhood up, where would bethe world’s progress? It is the eager reaching forward for something better that brings progress, which, alas! is not always synonymous with happiness.
But it is our duty to cultivate happiness, just the same. We can form the habit of cheerfulness and hopefulness and a courageous spirit which shall become, in time, the very essence of happiness, or at least a very good substitute for it. The woman who goes whining through life, the woman who is envious or self-conscious or unloving may fasten herself into a steel armor of endurance of this life, but she cannot hope to be happy; but the woman who accepts gladly the work close at her hand, and thanks God for it, plants sunshine in her own soul and radiates happiness from the heart.
More than ever women are learning to find and give out their happiness in the home. I once heard some excellent advice given by a speaker on domestic science: “I hold that it is the duty of every woman to make of her own body the strongest, best machine possible; and I believe that one of the great lessons to be taught to the women of America to-day is care of themselves. I wish I could reach out, notonly to all the girls in the land, but to all the mothers as well, and could say to them, ‘It is your duty to your family, to your neighbors, to your Maker, to give yourself the strongest body possible.’
“I wish the mothers would hear this, and could understand that the work which gives them too little sleep, or allows them no time for quiet eating of their food, which crowds them daily with nervous anxiety as to whether or not the work will all be accomplished, is the work which fills our insane asylums with broken-down women, that makes our mothers unable to give to their daughters the love, the care and attention that girls need in their growing years. A great good might be accomplished if it could be proved to women that kitchen utensils cost less than coffins, and that money paid for necessary help in the household is more profitable than money paid to doctors and nurses.”
No mother has a right to wear herself out physically so that she cannot be the central sun of the little system known as the family. My mother’s cheerfulness and courage and faith in God are my richest inheritances, and if I haveany faculty for happiness it is owing to her wonderful example. The average woman worries too much and fails to hold herself in the atmosphere of peace which is her rightful sphere if she chooses to enter in and possess it. “The art of growing old gracefully” is mastered when a woman realizes what true happiness is, and growing old has no further terrors for her.
There are plenty of shadows to be seen if we fix our vision on them instead of on the sunlight beyond and around them; but why not fasten our gaze on the glowing, life-giving sunshine instead? There is sorrow and grief in the world and some of it has come first or last to you and me; but why let it darken all our days, when Infinite love surrounds us and will give us everlasting peace if we but claim it? Adversity may come, but it cannot take away the serenity of the soul. Let us see to it that we fortify ourselves with that inner sense which constitutes true happiness.
“The duty of happiness” is something we owe to our own souls as much as to those around us. Let us find that centre of the whirlpool of life where perfect calm ever prevails.
“Let nothing make thee sad or fretful,Or too regretful,Be still;What God hath ordered must be right,Then find in it thine own delight,My will.“Why shouldst thou fill to-day with sorrowAbout to-morrow,My heart?One watches all with care most true,Doubt not that He will give thee, too,Thy part.“Only be steadfast; never waver;Nor seek earth’s favor,But rest.Thou knowest what God’s will must beFor all His creatures, so for theeThe best.”
“Let nothing make thee sad or fretful,Or too regretful,Be still;What God hath ordered must be right,Then find in it thine own delight,My will.“Why shouldst thou fill to-day with sorrowAbout to-morrow,My heart?One watches all with care most true,Doubt not that He will give thee, too,Thy part.“Only be steadfast; never waver;Nor seek earth’s favor,But rest.Thou knowest what God’s will must beFor all His creatures, so for theeThe best.”
“Let nothing make thee sad or fretful,Or too regretful,Be still;What God hath ordered must be right,Then find in it thine own delight,My will.
“Let nothing make thee sad or fretful,
Or too regretful,
Be still;
What God hath ordered must be right,
Then find in it thine own delight,
My will.
“Why shouldst thou fill to-day with sorrowAbout to-morrow,My heart?One watches all with care most true,Doubt not that He will give thee, too,Thy part.
“Why shouldst thou fill to-day with sorrow
About to-morrow,
My heart?
One watches all with care most true,
Doubt not that He will give thee, too,
Thy part.
“Only be steadfast; never waver;Nor seek earth’s favor,But rest.Thou knowest what God’s will must beFor all His creatures, so for theeThe best.”
“Only be steadfast; never waver;
Nor seek earth’s favor,
But rest.
Thou knowest what God’s will must be
For all His creatures, so for thee
The best.”