Evening Round-Up / More Good Stuff Like Pep

by William Crosbie Hunter

Most people have the idea that the possession of material things is necessary to happiness and that idea is what keeps architects, automobile makers, jewelers, tailors, hotels, railroads, steamships and golf courses busy.

Do your duty well, have a worth-while ambition, be a dreamer, have an ideal. Keep your duty in mind, be occupied sincerely with your work, keep on the road to your ideal and happiness will cross your path all the while.

Happiness is an elusive prize; it's wary, timid, alert and cannot be caught. Chase it and it escapes your grasp.

I read today of a friend who walked home with a workman. This is the workman's story: He had a son who was making a record in school. He had two daughters who helped their mother; he had a cottage, a little yard, a few flowers, a garden. He worked hard in a garage by day and evenings he cultivated his flowers, his garden, and his family. He had health, plus contentment a-plenty. His possessions were few and the care of them consequently a negligible effort.

Happiness flowed in the cracks of his door. Smiles were on his lips, joy in his heart, love in his bosom; that's the story my friend heard.

Then came a friend in an automobile on his way home from the club. He picked up my friend and to him a tale of woe, misery and discontent did unfold.

This club man had money, automobiles, social standing, possessions, and all the objects and material things envious persons covet—yet he was unhappy. His whole life was spent chasing happiness, but his sixty horsepower auto wasn't fast enough to catch it.

The poor man I have told you about was the man who washed the club man's auto.

The strenuous pleasure seeker fails to get happiness; that is an inexorable law. He develops into a pessimist with an acrid, satirical disgust at all the simple, worth-while, real things in life.

This is not a new discovery of mine; it's an old truth. Read Ecclesiastes, the pessimistic chronicle of the Bible, and you'll find what comes to the pleasure-chaser, and you will know about "vanity and vexation of spirit."