This piece is as relevant now as it was 90 years ago.We train and work and study for various ends. Be healthy, wealthy, and wise, we are told, and agree that the advice is excellent. It takes knowledge and horse sense and application to achieve these three things, certainly, but the gain is worth the effort. So we give our best years and strength to the job.
But there is another job which is somehow apt to be overlooked. We seem to believe that to achieve success in that direction we neither need to take thought nor to put forth effort. Success that way comes or fails to come, and little we have to do with the matter. Yet without that item, the other three are not what they are said to be.
Is it possible, then, to train and work and study for happiness as you do for the other good ends of life? Why not?
There are certain definite things that make for happiness. There is, for instance, work. If happiness is important, then the work you do should be of the kind you love doing. It should be work that uses the best of you, that interests you constantly, that keeps you keen and fit. You should do it for the joy of itself, not for what you get out of it in a money sense. Pay you should get, of course, selfsupport, independence. But of two working roads before you, you should choose the one that leads to a full development of your talents and your brains, rather than the one that brings in the greater money return. For if you lose your joy in work, you have paid a higher price for money than it is worth.
If you take your happiness job seriously, then, you will give a good deal of thought and plenty of time to selecting for your life's employment something that is going to be delightful to you. Probably the larger portion of your life will be spent at that work. You can see how important a part it must play in securing happiness for you. Happiness is not a slight thing, a thing of the moment, of a laughing day or a pleasant companion. It is a great and precious thing, built up on the very foundations of your being, part of each moment of your existence.
The man or woman who is bored is not happy. To have work that interests you and keeps you alert in mind and body is a great safeguard against boredom. But there are other safeguards. Here, in a world crowded with tremendous interests, where even the tiniest insect is a subject for wonder, where you could never exhaust the possibilities of a single acre of meadow or woodland, here it is not the world that is a bore, it is yourself who insists upon being bored despite the hundred thousand calls on your mind, on your sense of beauty, on your emotions. Your mind has a million windows through which you may look out upon marvelous and thrilling things, if you keep the windows open, if you learn how to open them. Even though the work you do gives you happiness in the doing, it is not enough, because our possibilities for happiness are endless. You want to cultivate as many of them as you can. You want to remember that nothing worth while comes for nothing. To get the joy of music, for instance, you need to know something of that art. The more you know, the greater your delight in it will be. It is the same with painting and sculpture. There is keen joy in these things, a joy that is developed by study and reflection and understanding. I have seen people look at the Victory of Samothrace or the Milo Venus as blindly as though there were no eyes in their heads. These forms of perfect beauty gave them no thrill of exquisite delight. For them the splendor of great art did not exist. They have failed to find one great source of happiness. Bored and dull, they stand before these mighty stones, which man's genius has transmuted to immortal spirit, and know it not and feel nothing.
Beauty, as we well know, is another of the definite items that bring happiness to the human being. Not only the beauty of art, but all beauty. If happiness is worth achievement, then cultivate your appreciation for beauty. Rejoice in it. Think how important it must have been considered, since so much time and detail is given to it in the building of the universe. Do you know that numberless tiny and intricate bones are placed in a bird's throat so that it may sing? Song is sheer beauty. Not only is the bird's throat marvelously made to sing, but your ear is wonderfully made to listen to that song. And the viewless air is fashioned to bear those notes from throat to ear, and so complete the amazing circle.
Truly, the more you think about beauty and its tremendous place in this world, the more your astonishment grows. Think of the ravishing effects of color in every sphere of life. To train that eager mind of yours to respond to these beauties is a task fullpacked with joy and happiness. Once you let yourself get interested, no walk you take but will be rich, no idle hour with nature as your only companion but will be full of excitement and pleasure to you. The people who love her and who study her are happy folk, and each step they take brings glorious return.
Training your capacity for reading, your understanding of the fine things of literature, is another sure pathway toward winning your happiness job. Language is one of our astonishing possessions, and is full of power and beauty. In great literature we find its highest expression, and we find, too, the thoughts and feeling of other men and women. Words are strange things. You can never walk side by side with John Muir, who has passed to farther trails than any he followed here. But take down one of his books from the shelf and read in it, and you seem to be walking with him, you see what he has seen, thrill to the adventures he has had, listen to his very voice as he speaks. You have had a glorious hour. Or take a simple story like "Jackanapes." You read those touching pages, so beautifully done, and you have added something to your own experience, something that will remain with you all your life. You have intimately shared another mind, another heart, through words, printed words. Is it not truly wonderful? And are not all sorts of lives and experiences and all the long thoughts of the generations of man yours if you choose to seek them? The love of books is a great love, a great power for happiness, and you can train yourself to find that love. To throw it away on cheap or vulgar stuff is to suffer a loss difficult to measure.
Play and the joy of bodily exercise are one of the simpler methods of getting at our happiness job that ought not to be overlooked. When we are youngsters we take to this form of happiness naturally; but as we begin to grow older, many of us neglect it. Girls especially are apt to let play and sport fade out of their lives. This is a great pity. There is no reason why a woman should not rejoice in play all her life long, should not take exercise for the sheer pleasure of it, if she be healthy. Walking and swimming and golfing are easy to keep up, and are valuable items toward happiness. And girls delight in them as well as boys. Keep your limbs sound and active and your lungs full of fresh air. Youth and joy too will companion you as a reward.
The great thing in training for happiness is to give time and effort toward developing the hundreds of avenues toward interest and activity which lie ready to hand within you—to train those bright eyes of yours to see, to observe, to quicken your understanding of the loveliness and wonder of this world; to train your powers of appreciation and discrimination to bring to you all that is most worth while. Life is a thrilling, mysterious business if we do not smother it under commonplaces and dullnesses. The things men are doing are tremendous, and we too can be of that band if we will. This new generation now coming to the fore is sure to discover immense secrets that are still hidden to us, to find new and great truths, to do splendid and important things that will help the whole race onward on its mighty march. Each one of you can play some part in this work, and can get the true happiness of understanding and sharing what the rest are doing.
Of the happiness to be got through friendship and from the other relations of life, I have not spoken. To get this happiness needs training, needs effort. You cannot be a good friend without trouble. You cannot, without charm, attract another. To be loved and valued is better than to achieve a business success that leaves you lonely and disliked. It is a fine thing to succeed in your business; give it your whole-hearted effort. But it is still finer to achieve a sincerity, a generosity, and simplicity that will make you good to be with, will make those who know you love you. Happiness comes with love, if that love is gentle and giving. You must work hard to make yourself lovable clean through, a work that goes on all your life and every minute of that life, but there is no surer way to grasp happiness than that.
Life is a dangerous business, certainly, and all we cherish most in it may be swept away in an instant. But the fiber of happiness is not so easily destroyed. Sorrow and loss come to all, to some more, to others less. But it is from the warp and woof of your days that you construct happiness. It is born of the full use and gift of yourself; it is born of character, of delight in the day's employment, of an open heart to the beauty and the wonder of the world you are in, of response to the great calls that reach even beyond it. You cannot buy happiness, you have to make it. Its material lies within you.
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