Part 3 (2/2)
We cannot sit idly by and neglect to earn money to provide food, shelter and education for our loved ones, but between times we should seek the wealth that comes from right mental employment.
The millionaire thinks, dreams and gets dollars and that is all.
The worth-while man thinks kindness, usefulness, self-improvement, brotherhood, love, and he gets happiness.
The man who discovers means to help his fellowman, does a good act, but it is the man with the dollars in front of his eyes that commercializes the discovery and invention.
In the end the man that helped mankind fares better than the man who made the millions.
It's a great crowd surging by, and very few have the good sense to learn the value of TODAY. That great crowd I see below my window thinks ever of tomorrow and forgets TODAY.
Those who think always of tomorrow will never get the beauties and joys from life that comes to the little group, of Today, who appreciates and enjoys the real Now, rather than the pictured Tomorrow that never comes.
It's mighty interesting to watch the crowd go by and speculate on their movements.
Save up your pennies, measure everything by the dollar standard, think dollars, dream dollars, work, slave, push for the dollars and you will build a fortune. You will never have peace or recreation, or joy; you will live only in hope of a some day when you will retire. That's the way the millionaires travel life's highway.
Some day the paper will announce the death of those millionaires and then the dollars will be blown in by reckless heirs, and so the grinding wheels roll on.
Surely there are many ways of looking at things. Surely there is much of interest in the crowd. Surely there is an unending fund from which to speculate, in that crowd way down on the street below my window.
What pa.s.sions, what hopes, what joys, what sorrows, are in the hearts of that hurrying, worrying crowd.
What noise this din of traffic makes, what activity man has stirred up.
A picture, a drama, a tragedy, a comedy, all these I see in the human ants that run along below the hive where I sit and write these lines.
The phone rings and my little Nancy Lou's voice says, ”Daddy, will you please bring me a pencil and a tablet with lines on it.”
So I must needs stop this, whatever you may call it, and push through the crowd to get that tablet with ”lines on it” for my Nancy Lou; and there is some feeling of happiness and content and peace in Daddy's heart as he lays down his pen, for Daddy is going Home, and that word means a lot in his little family, where they all say ”Daddy” instead of Papa or Father.
DOING THINGS TWICE
A Common Habit That Saps Nerve Power
It is hard enough to do duty once, but doubly hard when you antic.i.p.ate mentally everything you have to do tomorrow.
This doing things twice is a habit easily acquired if you don't watch out, and it means wasted energy.
I have just read the experience of a housewife who was resting on a couch reading; her eye caught sight of a book lying on the floor across the room.
Instantly her mindometer, if I may coin a word, registered, ”when you get up, pick up that book.”
She went on reading, but her mind was not on the magazine she held, but on that book on the floor.
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