THE HABIT OF HAPPINESS
The highest happiness must always come from the exercise of the best
thing in us.
When you find happiness in anything but useful work, you will be the
first man or woman to make the discovery.
If you take an inventory of yourself at the very outset of your career
you will find that you think you are going to find happiness in things
or in conditions. Most people think they are going to find the largest
part of their happiness in money, what money will buy or what it will
give them in the way of power, influence, comforts, luxuries. They
think they are going to find a great deal of their happiness in
marriage. How quickly they find that the best happiness they will ever
know is that which must be limited to their own capacity for enjoyment,
that their happiness can not come from anything outside of them but
must be developed from within. Many people believe they are going to
find much of their happiness in books, in travel, in leisure, in
freedom from the thousand and one anxieties and cares and worries of
business; but the moment they get in the position where they thought
they would have freedom many other things come up in their minds and
cut off much of the expected joy. When they get money and leisure they
often find that they are growing selfish, which cuts off a lot of their
happiness. No man able to work can be idle without feeling a sense of
guilt at not doing his part in the world, for every time he sees the
poor laboring people who are working for him, who are working
everywhere, he is constantly reminded of his meanness in shifting upon
others what he is able to do and ought to do himself. Idleness is the
last place to look for happiness. Idleness is like a stagnant pool.
The moment the water ceases to flow, to work, to do something, all
sorts of vermin and hideous creatures develop in it. It becomes torpid
and unhealthy giving out miasma and repulsive odors. In the same way
work is the only thing that will keep the individual healthy and
wholesome and clean. An idle brain very quickly breeds impurities.
The married man quickly learns that his domestic happiness depends upon
what he himself contributes to the partnership, that he can not take
out a great deal without putting a great deal in, for selfishness
always reaps a mean, despicable harvest. It is only the generous giver
who gets much. There is nothing which will so shrivel up a man; and
contract his capacity for happiness as selfishness. It is always a
fatal blighter, blaster, disappointer. We must give to get, we must be
great before we can get great enjoyment; great in our motive, grand in
our endeavor, sublime in our ideas.
It is impossible, absolutely unscientific, for a bad person to be truly
happy; just as impossible as it would be for one to be comfortable
while lying on a bed of nettles which are constantly pricking him.
There is no way under heaven by which a person can be really happy
without being good, clean, square, and true. This does not mean that a
person is happy because he does not use tobacco, drink, gamble, use
profane language or does not do other vicious things. Some of the
meanest, narrowest, most contemptible people in the world do none of
these things but they are uncharitable, jealous, envious, revengeful.
They stab you in the back, slander you, cheat you. They may be
cunning, underhanded, and yet have a fairly good standing in the
church. No person can be really happy who has a small, narrow,
bigoted, uncharitable mind or disposition. Generosity, charity,
kindness are absolutely essential to real happiness. Deceitful people
can not be happy; they can not respect themselves because they inwardly
despise themselves for deceiving you. A person must be open minded,
transparent, simple, in order to be really happy. A person who is
always covering up something, trying to keep things from you,
misleading you, deceiving you, can not get away from self-reproach, and
hence can not be really happy.
Selfishness is a fatal enemy of happiness because no one ever does a
really selfish thing without feeling really mean, without despising
himself for it. I have never seen a strong young man sneak into a
vacant seat in a car and allow an old man or woman with a package or a
baby in her arms to stand, without looking as though he knew he had
done a mean, selfish thing. There is a look of humiliation in his
face. We are so constituted that we can not help condemning ourselves
for our mean or selfish acts.
The liar is never really happy. He is always on nettles lest his
deceit betray him. He never feels safe. Dishonesty in all its phases
is fatal to happiness, for no dishonest person can get his
self-approval. Without this no happiness is possible.
Before you can be really happy, my friend, you must be able to look
back upon a well-spent past, a conscientious, unselfish past. If not,
you will be haunted by demons which will destroy your happiness. If
you have been mean and selfish, greedy and dishonest with your
fellowmen, all sorts of horrible things will rise out of your money
pile to terrify and to make your happiness impossible.
In other words, happiness is merely a result of the life work. It will
partake of the exact quality of the motive which you have put into your
life work. If these motives have been selfish, greedy, grasping, if
cunning and dishonesty have dominated in your career, your happiness
will be marred accordingly.
You can not complain of your happiness, because it is your own child,
the product of your own brain, your own effort. It has been made up of
your motives, colored by your life aim. It exactly corresponds to the
cause which produced it.
There is the greatest difference in the world between the happiness
which comes from a sweet, beautiful, unselfish, helpful, sympathetic,
industrious, honorable career, and the mean satisfaction which may grow
to be a part of your marked self if you have lived a selfish, grasping
life.
What we call happiness is the harvest from our life sowing, our
habitual thought-sowing, deed-doing. If we have sown selfish, envious,
jealous, revengeful, hateful seeds, greedy, grasping seeds, we can not
expect a golden happiness harvest like that which comes from a clean
and unselfish, helpful sowing.
If our harvest is full of the rank, poisonous weeds of jealousy, envy,
dishonesty, cunning, and cruelty, we have no one to blame but
ourselves, for we sowed the seed which produced that sort of a harvest.
Somehow some people have an entirely wrong idea of what real happiness
is. They seem to think it can be bought, can be had by influence, that
it can be purchased by money; that if they have money they can get that
wonderful, mysterious thing which they call happiness.
But happiness is a natural, faithful harvest from our sowing. It would
be as impossible for selfish seed, greed seed to produce a harvest of
contentment, of genuine satisfaction, of real joy, as for thistle seeds
to produce a harvest of wheat or corn.
Whatever the quality of your enjoyment or happiness may be, you have
patterned it by your life motive by the spirit in which you have
worked, by the principles which have actuated you.
A pretty different harvest, I grant, many of us must face, marred with
all sorts of hideous, poisonous weeds, but they are all the legitimate
product of our sowing. No one can rob us of our harvest or change it
very much. Every thought, every act, every motive, whether secret or
public, is a seed which no power on earth can prevent going to its
harvest of beauty or ugliness, honor or shame. Most people have an
idea that happiness is something that can be manufactured. They do not
realize that it can no more be manufactured than wheat or corn can be
manufactured. It must be grown, and the harvest will be like the seed.
You, young man, make up your mind at the very outset of your career
that whatever comes to you in life, that whether you succeed or fail,
whether you have this or that, there is one thing you will have, and
that is a happy, contented mind, that you will extract your happiness
as you go along. You will not take the chances of picking up or
developing the happy habit after you get rich, for then you may be too
old.
Most people postpone their enjoyment until they are disappointed to
find the power of enjoyment has largely gone by and that even if they
had the means they could not get anything like as much real happiness
out of it as they could have gotten as they went along when they were
younger. Take no chances with your happiness, or the sort of a life
that can produce it; whatever else you risk, do not risk this. Early
form the happy habit, the habit of enjoyment every day, no matter what
comes or does not come to you during the day. Pick crumbs of comfort
out of your situation, no matter how unpleasant or disagreeable.
I know a man who, although poor, can manage to get more comfort out of
a real tough, discouraging situation than any one else I have ever
seen. I have often seen him when he did not have a dollar to his name,
with a wife to support; yet he was always buoyant, happy, cheerful,
consented. He would even make fun out of an embarrassing situation,
see something ludicrous in his extreme poverty.
There have never been such conflicting estimates, such varying ideas,
regarding any state of human condition as to what constitutes
happiness. Many people think that it is purchasable with money, but
many of the most restless, discontented, unhappy people in the world
are rich. They have the means of purchasing what they _thought_ would
produce happiness, but the real thing eludes them. On the other hand,
some of the poorest people in the world are happy. The fact is that
there is no possible way of cornering or purchasing happiness for it is
absolutely beyond the reach of money. It is true, we can purchase a
few comforts and immunities from some annoyances and worries with money
which we can not get without it. On the other hand, the great majority
of people who have inherited money are positively injured by it,
because it often stops their own development by taking away the motive
for self-effort and self-reliance.
When people get money they often stop growing because they depend upon
the money instead of relying upon their own inherent resources.
Rich people suffer from their indulgences more than poor ones suffer
from their hardships.
A great many rich people die with liver and kidney troubles which are
effected both by eating and drinking. The kidneys are very susceptible
to the presence of alcohol. If rich people try to get greater
enjoyment out of life than poor people by eating and drinking, they are
likely very quickly to come to grief. If they try to seek it through
the avenue of leisure they soon find that an idle brain is one of the
most dangerous things in the world--nothing deteriorates faster. The
mind was made for continual strong action, systematic, vigorous
exercise, and this is possible only when some dominating aim and a
great life purpose leads the way.
No person can be really healthful whose mind is not usefully and
continually employed. So there is no possibility of finding real
happiness in idleness if we are able to work. Nature brings a
wonderful compensatory power to those who are crippled or sick or
otherwise disabled from working, but there is no compensation for
idleness in those who are able to work. Nature only gives us the use
of faculties we employ. "Use or lose" is her motto, and when we cease
to use a faculty or function it is gradually taken away from us,
gradually shrivels and atrophies.
There is no satisfaction like that which comes from the steady,
persistent, honest, conscientious pursuit of a noble aim. There are a
multitude of evidences in man's very structure that his marvelous
mechanism was intended for action, for constant exercise, and that
idleness and stagnation always mean deterioration and death of power.
No man can remain idle without shrinking, shrivelling, constantly
becoming a less efficient man; for he can keep up only those faculties
and powers which he constantly employs, and there is no other possible
way. Nature puts her ban of deterioration and loss of power upon
idleness. We see these victims everywhere shorn of power--weak,
nerveless, backboneless, staminaless, gritless people, without
forcefulness, mere nonentities because they have ceased working.
Without work mental health is impossible and without health the fullest
happiness is impossible.
It has been said that happiness is the most delusive thing that man
pursues. Yet why need it be a blind search?
If we were to stop the first hundred people we meet on the street and
ask them what in their experience has given them the most happiness,
probably the answer of no two would be alike.
How interesting and instructive it would be to give a thousand dollars
to each of these hundred people, and without their knowing it, follow
them and see what they would do with the money,--what it would mean to
them.
To some poor youth hungry for an education, with no opportunity to gain
it, this money would mean a college education. Another would see in
his money a more comfortable home for his aged parents. To another
this money would suggest all sorts of dissipation. Some would see
books and leisure for self-improvement, a trip abroad.
We all wear different colored glasses and no two see life with the same
tint.
Some find their present happiness in coarse dissipation; others in a
quiet nook with a book. Some find their greatest happiness in friends,
in social intercourse; others seek happiness in roving over the earth,
always thinking that the greatest enjoyment is in another day, in
another place, a little further on, in the next room, or to-morrow, or
in another country.
_To many people, happiness is never where they are, but almost anywhere
else_.
Most people lose sight of the simplicity of happiness. They look for
it in big, complicated things. Real happiness is perfectly simple. In
fact, it is incompatible with complexity. Simplicity is its very
essence.
I was dining recently with a particularly successful young man who is
trying very hard to be happy, but he takes such a complicated,
strenuous view of everything that his happiness is always flying from
him. He drives everything so fiercely, his life is so vigorous, so
complicated, that happiness can not find a home with him very long.
Nor does he understand why. He has money, health; but he always has
that restless far-away, absent-minded gaze into something beyond, and I
do not think he is ever really very happy. His whole manner of living
is extremely complex. He does not seem to know where to find
happiness. He has evidently mistaken the very nature of happiness. He
thinks it consists in making a great show, in having great possessions,
in doing things which attract a great deal of attention; but _happiness
would be strangled, suffocated in such an environment_. The essentials
of real happiness are few, simple, and close at hand.
Happiness is made up of very simple ingredients. It flees from the
complex life. It evades pomp and show. The heart would starve amid
the greatest luxuries.
Simple joys and the treasures of the heart and mind make happiness.
Happiness has very little to do with material things. It is a mental
state of mind. Real permanent happiness can not be found in mere
temporary things, because its roots reach away down into eternal
principles.
One of the most pathetic pictures in civilization is the great army of
men and women searching the world over for happiness, as though it
existed in things rather than in a state of mind.
The people who have spent years and a fortune trying to find it look as
hungry and as lean of contentment and all that makes life desirable as
when they started out. Chasing happiness all over the world is about
as silly a business as any human being ever engaged in, for it was
never yet found by any pursuer. Yet happiness is the simplest thing in
the world. It is found in many a home with carpetless floors and
pictureless walls. It knows neither rank, station, nor color, nor does
it recognize wealth. It only demands that it live with a contented
mind and pure heart. It will not live with ostentation; it flees from
pretense; it loves the simple life; it insists upon a sweet, healthful,
natural environment. It hates the forced and complicated and formal.
Real happiness flees from the things that pass away; it abides only in
principle, permanency.
I have never seen a person who has lived a grasping, greedy,
money-chasing life, who was not disappointed at what money has given
him for his trouble.
It is only in giving, in helping, that we find our quest. Everywhere
we go we see people who are disappointed, chagrined, shocked, to find
that what they thought would be the angel of happiness turned out to be
only a ghost.
All the misery and the crime of the world rest upon the failure of
human beings to understand the principle that _no man can really be
happy until he harmonizes with the best thing in him, with the divine,
and not with the brute_. No one can be happy who tries to harmonize
his life with his animal instincts. _The God (the good) in him is the
only possible thing that can make him happy_.
Real happiness can not be bribed by anything sordid or low. Nothing
mean or unworthy appeals to it. There is no affinity between them.
Founded upon principle, it is as scientific as the laws of mathematics,
and he who works his problem correctly will get the happiness answer.
There is only one way to secure the correct answer to a mathematical
problem; and that is to work in harmony with mathematical laws. It
would not matter if half the world believed there was some other way to
get the answer, it would never come until the law was followed with the
utmost exactitude.
It does not matter that the great majority of the human race believe
there is some other way of reaching the happiness goal. The fact that
they are discontented, restless, and unhappy shows that they are not
working their problem scientifically.
We are all conscious that there is another man inside of us, that there
accompanies us through life a divine, silent messenger, that other,
higher, better self, which speaks from the depths of our nature and
which gives its consent, its "amen" to every right action, and condemns
every wrong one.
Man is built upon the plan of honesty, of rectitude--the divine plan.
When he perverts his nature by trying to express dishonesty, chicanery,
and cunning, of course he can not be happy.
The very essence of happiness is honesty, sincerity, truthfulness. He
who would have real happiness for his companion must be clean,
straightforward, and sincere. The moment he departs from the right she
will take wings and fly away.
It is just as impossible for a person to reach the normal state of
harmony while he is practising selfish, grasping methods, as it is to
produce harmony in an orchestra with instruments that are all jangled
and out of tune. To be happy, we must be in tune with the infinite
within us, in harmony with our better selves. There is no way to get
around it.
There is no tonic like that which comes from doing things worth while.
There is no happiness like that which comes from doing our level best
every day, everywhere; no satisfaction like that which comes from
stamping superiority, putting our royal trade-mark upon everything
which goes through our hands.
Recently a rich young man was asked why he did not work. "I do not
have to," he said. "Do not have to" has ruined more young men than
almost anything else. The fact is, Nature never made any provision for
the idle man. Vigorous activity is the law of life; it is the saving
grace, the only thing that can keep a human being from retrograding.
Activity along the line of one's highest ambition is the normal state
of man, and he who tries to evade it pays the penalty in deterioration
of faculty, in paralysis of efficiency. Do not flatter yourself that
you can be really happy unless you are useful. Happiness and
usefulness were born twins. To separate them is fatal.
It is as impossible for a human being to be happy who is habitually
idle as it is for a fine chronometer to be normal when not running.
The highest happiness is the feeling of wellbeing which comes to one
who is actively employed doing what he was made to do, carrying out the
great life-purpose patterned in his individual bent. The practical
fulfilling of the life-purpose is to man what the actual running and
keeping time are to the watch. Without action both are meaningless.
Man was made to do things. Nothing else can take the place of
achievement in his life. Real happiness without achievement of some
worthy aim is unthinkable. One of the greatest satisfactions in this
world is the feeling of enlargement, of growth, of stretching upward
and onward. No pleasure can surpass that which comes from the
consciousness of feeling one's horizon of ignorance being pushed
farther and farther away--of making headway in the world--of not only
getting on, but also of getting up.
Happiness is incompatible with stagnation. A man must feel his
expanding power lifting, tugging away at a lofty purpose, or he will
miss the joy of living.
The discords, the bickerings, the divorces, the breaking up of rich
homes, and the resorting to all sorts of silly devices by many rich
people in their pursuit of happiness, prove that it does not dwell with
them, that happiness does not abide with low ideals, with selfishness,
idleness, and discord. It is a friend of harmony, of truth, of beauty,
of affection, of 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 can not 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!
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 thing, 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.