There are two ways of viewing the oncoming years, as burdens or as
opportunities, with fear or with expectation. The days of the new year
may loom up as a series of unwelcome tasks to be unwillingly done or as
so many invitations to attempt and achieve great things. The
difference between these two points of view marks the difference
between enduring life and finding the life that endures.
The wise preacher of long ago caught sight of one of these distinctions
that cut clear through to the roots of things. He says that the sign
of old age is that a man is "afraid of that which is high." When
courage and ambition have gone old age and decrepitude have entered in,
no matter whether a man be eighteen or eighty.
He alone has youth, he alone has life before him, who can still catch
the vision of the ideal, of that which is high, who can lift up his
eyes beyond the horizon of practicabilities and precedents and see the
things not yet realized. There is a time when men must dream dreams
and see visions, when they must feast on noble purposes or die so far
as the inner spirit and all that makes real living is concerned.
If you find the will becoming dull and listless, with no quickening of
the pulses, but only apathy or a sneer for the high purpose or the
great promise, it is but a sign of the approach of senility, of the
failure of the powers. When the ambition can be satisfied with the
less while the greater is before it, when things low and base are
preferred to things high, afar off, and difficult to attain, the heart
is dying already.
Cherish as the spark of life the aspiration to have and do and be the
best. Yet who is there does not know the paralyzing chill that the
sneer of the philistine or even the memory of our own many failures can
give when great possibilities offer themselves to us? How easily enter
in the cold considerations that deaden our aspirations; how subtle the
temptation to be content with the condition that involves neither toil
nor pain. How hard to realize that this is an invitation to death.
To all men comes the thrill of the passion to do some great thing, to
give to our world some worthy service. To yield to this is to keep the
heart young, is to defy time, to conquer the years. Whether the coming
days shall bend the back with their burdens or shall nerve and
strengthen the life does not depend on whether they have cares or joys
in them, but on whether they find us responsive to the call of noble
things.
No man can afford to let a pure and lofty impulse die, nor, for fear of
failure or of ridicule, to become afraid or ashamed of his ideals.
Living is more than a dull feeding at tables or troughs, more than
shelter and sleep; it is growing, climbing, becoming, finding higher
levels and seeing yet higher before.
Nor is this all; the spirit of greatness finds ample play in daily
duties. The success of the year does not depend on whether you can do
things that shall amaze men to-day or make your name known forever, but
upon whether into all the things you do, lowly, humdrum, commonplace as
they may seem to be, the daily duties of home or shop or store, the
care of the baby, or the running of a typewriter, there shall enter the
great and high motive.
This is what we all need, the high vision of the lowly things, the
sight of the fact that the least piece of work is an essential part of
the service of the whole universe, that a man serves the Divine not by
wearing a black coat but by doing, as in God's name, with high motives
the least duties that may be his. It is not place nor authority nor
wage that makes the work high or low; it is the spirit of the service
and the part it plays in the world's great business of perfecting
humanity.
Would you ward off old age, cherish vitality and give value to your
days, seek the things that are above, the life that serves some worthy
end. One is young as long as his heart leaps responsive to a noble
call. But he who lives to pleasure, to the satisfaction of self, who
has shut his eyes to the high things that call for self-denial, for
toil and loss, is dead already.