Help Others
Help others. This is the old and ever new way. As Maeterlinck says:
“Before we can bring happiness to others, we must first be happy ourselves. Nor will happiness abide within us unless we confer it on others. If there be a smile upon our lips, those around us will soon smile too; and our happiness will become the truer and deeper as we see that these others are happy.”
Therefore, keep happy by helping others. We can help others by our thoughts—by wishing them to be well and happy and successful, or by imagining them to be well and happy and successful. We can help them by all our expressions—our words, our looks, our acts—and by our very abstinence from non-happiness.
Abstain from Thoughts against Others and against Self
Merely to send out no thoughts and to harbour no thoughts against other persons or things, or against ourselves, is a step in the right direction. I once saw hornets destroyed by a man who stood over the nest and, as each hornet came out, knocked it down and killed it by a blow from a little wooden bat. So we can beat down any undesirable thought—of worry or failure or resentment, etc.—so that it ceases to live and poison us or others.
But still this is negative. It is not positive and constructive. To keep happy, we must fill the glass, drop by drop, with the sparkling and fresh water of Happiness; and then the dirty water will automatically trickle away, and—who knows?—somehow become a kind of mental manure and fertiliser.
“Self-Suggestion”
Self-Suggestion is a great help, if we would keep happy. We can tell ourselves to keep happy, in the same way as Peter Latham, at a hard and critical point in one of his Professional Championship Matches, kept not only happy but also plucky by telling himself to “buck up,” as this was the chance to bring out his best game!
Self-Suggestion has many forms and varieties. Henry Wood, in his “Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography,” advises us to write down inspiring “Self-Suggestions,” and to look at them often. Leland, in his “Have You a Strong Will?” advises us to determine, the last thing at night, that the next day we will, for example, work calmly and easily and successfully. I myself find that now one form of Self-Suggestion is most effective, now another. It may be Imagination or Realisation or Assertion, or it may be a quiet order to the Servant Mind or Manager Mind, or it may be a strongly-felt and repeated Desire, or it may be nearer to Silence and Receptivity, together with “the attitude of expectancy.”