To be a worthy member of a good school is a great privilege, furnishing as it does a stimulus to high endeavor which rarely comes in any other way. It is a distinct honor to sustain and enhance a worthy name. If you have the right school spirit, you can do nothing less than throw all the power of your influence into the task of making your school a place where future students may learn how to meet and be true to the responsibilities and obligations of life. The atmosphere which makes easy this kind of growth is created only by living personalities, by the touch of life upon life.
VIII
MAKING THE BEST OF THINGS
I have noticed that many people who seem to the casual observer to be favorites of fortune, having no large and serious troubles to worry about, so magnify their small ones that life loses much of its joy. Most men and women who rebel at their lot in life fancy that their discontent lies in the deprivation of some definite thing. Had it not been for this or that unfavorable condition, their lives would have been happy and successful. One possesses too small a share of this world’s goods and continually allows his thoughts to dwell upon what he might have had or might have done if he had been blessed with wealth. He forgets to appreciate and to be grateful for health, family, friends, and a host of other blessings. He has the lurking feeling that wealth is the one thing which would have made his life happy, in spite of the fact that he knows that it has not brought happiness to many who possess it. So he settles down to a discontented, second-rate life.
With another, it is a lack of robust health that causes discontent. Such a person forgets that much of the best work of the world has been accomplished by men of frail health, as, for instance, Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Another finds a source of unhappiness in his environment in life, or in a lack of particular advantages and opportunities. He is sure that he might have become an artist or a musician or a scholar had not Fate been so unkind as to deprive him of opportunity. Yet we have but to point to scores of persons who have won the highest success in these fields in spite of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Some women are unhappy because they cannot obtain the position in society for which they believe themselves fitted; others crave luxury and ease denied them. Many women long to exchange their idleness for a work in life. As to work, it sometimes seems as if half the workers of the world are envying the other half their particular field of labor. Each sees the advantages of the other’s task, but not its disadvantages. The laboring man envies the business or professional man the supposed ease of his work and its larger returns. The business or professional man often looks with envy upon the day laborer, because of his freedom from care and the simplicity of his life. And so each looks over the edge of his work, discontented, to that of his neighbor. How seldom are we willing to admit that the cause of our discontent lies within ourselves!
It is true that there is a discontent which is right. It is discontent with what we are and it is born of aspiration. One who feels this divine discontent well knows that his life has not been as fruitful as it should have been, and he is determined that the future shall redeem, as far as possible, the inadequacy of the past. He says with Whittier:—
“I better know than all
How little I have gained,
How vast the unattained!”
If ever we find ourselves satisfied with our attainments it simply means that we have a very low standard of success. Some one has said, “One should never believe that he has succeeded, but always that he is going to succeed.”