CHAPTER XII
RADIANCIES OF JOY, INSPIRATION, AND SERENITY
I want to radiate the healthfulness of joy. Joy is the sunshine of the soul. Let it shine. If there is so much of it that it fills the soul, it makes of it a luminous body that must radiate light and warmth and health to others. The joyous man is the healthy man, and he that has health should joy to give it to others, whenever and wherever he can. My friend, Marshall P. Wilder, was a radiating center of joy as well as fun. He was funny, but he was more—he was joyous. There was no enmity, no malice, no unkindness, no cruelty in his fun; it was all healthful, kind, sane, and joyous.
A little girl once said of a certain man: "I like that man because he always shines at me." Don't you want to shine and make glad the innocent heart of a child, the striving heart of the young, the sorrowful and vexed heart of the middle-aged, and the weary heart of the old? Well did Robert Louis Stevenson say:
A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of good will; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted.
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.
Make the most of your happiness, and the least of your sorrows. Use the telescope at the enlarging end for the former and at the reducing end for the latter, until you have learned what most of us have to learn—how foolish and wrong it is to make our joys mere incidents while we make our sorrows events.
I want to radiate a joy in the little things of to-day. Most people live in anticipation. The things of to-day are not enough. It is, "Oh, tomorrow—next week—next year—will surely bring me my heart's desire!" Let us learn that to-day is the fulfillment of the heart's desire. Take to-day all it brings, and it will make to-day so full that you will have no care for the joys of anticipation. Live now, so intensely, so fully, that life to-day will be compelled to deliver up all its treasures to-day. Hence every day becomes a perfect joy.
I want to radiate inspiration. I do not believe the idea that the saints of old who wrote "the Bible," are the only examples of inspiration. God inspires every good man and good woman, and all good in all people comes from Him, for He is the original source.