How To Get What You Want

I am not fighting my fight, I am singing my Song.

Life should be one glad sweet song instead of a dirge as it is with so many people. It was intended that life should be a glory and not a grind.

The new philosophy teaches that everybody ought to be happier than the happiest of us are now. Our lives were intended to be infinitely richer, grander, and more glorious than they are.

Have you ever experienced that moment which you would like to last forever? I believe the time will come when your habitual state of happiness and of satisfaction will be greater than the happiest, gladdest moment you have ever experienced.

In an article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Twenty Minutes of Reality,” the writer described an experience he had while convalescing in a hospital after a surgical operation. It was a gray March day, with a cloudy sky. There was nothing unusually exciting or exhilarating in the convalescent’s immediate atmosphere or environment, when suddenly he felt as if he had been translated to a new world of light, happiness and joy.

“I cannot say what the mysterious change was,” he said. “I saw no new thing, but I saw all the usual things in a miraculous new light—in what I believe is their true light. I saw for the first time how wildly beautiful and joyous beyond all words of mine to describe, is the whole of life. Every human being moving across that porch, every sparrow that flew, every branch tossing in the wind, was caught in and was a part of the whole mad ecstasy of loveliness, of joy, of importance, of intoxication, of life. . . . For those glorified moments I was in love with every living thing before me—the trees in the wind, the little birds flying, the nurses, the interns, the people who came and went. There was nothing that was alive that was not a miracle. Just to be alive was in itself a miracle. My very soul flowed out of me in a great joy.”

If it is possible to live in a world of happiness and beauty for twenty minutes, is it not possible to prolong the time—to live always in such a world?

We are all seeking this enchanted world, but most of us in the same way that the little boy in the story sought it.

A poor little boy, so runs this old story, once lived in a little weather-worn cottage on the top of a hill. He was a dreamy boy and every evening at sunset he would sit on the doorstep looking down toward the valley, fascinated by a beautiful house with wonderful golden windows shining a long way off at the far end of the valley.

He was greatly dissatisfied with the poverty of his surroundings, and the sight of the house in the valley, where he had never been, made him very unhappy. “Ah,” he would sigh, “what a poor miserable home my hut is! If I could only live in that beautiful house with the golden windows how happy I should be!”

One evening when the golden windows, more wonderful than ever, seemed beckoning him to come, the boy made up his mind he would go and visit the house beautiful. So, early next morning he started out. The road was dusty and the sun was hot, but the little traveler trudged on and on. At length, toward sundown he found himself at the far side of the valley. But what had become of the beautiful house he had seen from his hill-top? What he stood looking at was only an old tumble-down barn. And the wonderful windows? Alas, they were not gold at all, but just ordinary glass, and dirty and broken, too.

Tired and thirsty, the little boy flung himself on the ground with his back to the deserted barn, and sobbed bitterly. Then, slowly raising his head and looking up across the valley, through blinding tears, he saw a shining blur, — his own little cottage on the hill-top! And lo, its windows, in the light of the setting sun, were a sheet of blazing gold!

How like this little boy we grown-ups are! It is always the house in the distance that beckons. The beauty and glory of life, to our discontented, longing eyes, are always afar off in some other place and time, somewhere else than just where we are and in what we are doing. Some day we hope to enter the house beautiful, but not today. We expect that in the future, through some magic or other, through money or what money can purchase, we are going to find happiness. But no human being has ever grasped the beautiful mirage which beckons him in the distance.

Most of the people I know impress me as being greatly disappointed with what life has given them. They have not found any such future as they anticipated. When they reached those years which youth had pictured so free from care and anxiety, so satisfying to their aspirations, they found existence very ordinary, very tame, very commonplace, and far from happy. The mirage which from a distance appeared so beautiful had receded when they reached the spot from which it had beckoned, and it was still beckoning from an ever receding beyond.

The chief cause of our discontent and unhappiness is that hardly anyone is satisfied with what he has. The little simple things don’t count for anything with us. We are always looking for some big thing to make us happy,—a fortune, some grand opportunity, and some indefinite happiness which we are at a loss to describe. And we seem to think that whatever this thing is that is going to make us really happy is always somewhere in the shadowy future.

“It is the tormented spirit of man that always strives to bend the universe to his desires,” says Dr. Frank Crane. “Hence most souls do not fit. They are at everlasting war with fate. They do not understand how to be happy with what is, because they are always straining for what is not.”

Some people don’t even know what they are straining for. How many of the discontented people you have ever met could give you any intelligent idea of the cause of their unhappiness? They know they are discontented, unhappy; many of them chase the world over, trying to discover something which is not discoverable, which is only a by-product of a worthy deed; and this by-product cannot be obtained until the deed is performed.

We push and elbow our way through life and frantically struggle to get hold of things which we believe will make us happy,—and behold, the moment we grasp them, the charm, with which our imagination had invested them, vanishes!

The thing we had set our heart on and which we got into our possession yesterday is not the same thing today. It does not begin to give the pleasure which it promised, and we are no nearer satisfaction than before. But our attention is quickly attracted to something else, which we feel sure will compensate for our disappointment, and we grasp at it only to repeat the same experience—disappointment, disillusion. It does not fill the void in our hearts.

There is ever an unsatisfied longing which we spend our lives trying to fill. No matter what we may obtain in the way of material things, while we may get a certain sort of pleasure and comfort from them, they do not satisfy the inward soul hunger. They are like the different things which we take on a hot day, instead of pure cold water, to quench our thirst. We think if we could only get some soda-water, some ice cream, iced tea or coffee it would satisfy our longing, but it does not. Nothing but pure cold water will give the satisfaction we crave. All substitutes for this simplest and most plentiful of all beverages lack something. They leave us unsatisfied, with a longing for the genuine article.

Happiness is like water. There is no substitute that will take its place. One of the strangest things in life is the false ideas everywhere prevalent regarding the nature of happiness. The general belief seems to be that it is founded on things that can be bought with money. The more money the more things, and the more things the more enjoyment, the greater the degree of happiness.

But money has never yet been known to buy happiness. No one has ever yet found happiness by chasing it over the earth. It is not in our food, it is not in our drink, it is not in our clothes or material possessions; it is not in excitement or a constant round of pleasure. Happiness is born of right living. It is the child of right thinking, and right acting, of helpful service. A selfish life never knows real happiness. Greed and envy never touch it.

Half the unhappiness in the world is caused by losing the blessings which would result from the enjoyment of what we have in envying others and longing for what they have.

I know of a man and his family who a few years ago were quite content in their little cottage in the country. By some venture, however, they happened to make a few thousand dollars without working hard for it, and immediately a new longing sprang up in their hearts for a life of ease and pleasure.

Immediately these people began to dress more expensively and to struggle to get into the society of wealthy people, to climb socially. They strained in every way to keep up appearances beyond their means. Envy and jealousy of those who were better off filled their hearts. The result was that in a short time the old-time peace and harmony of the family life were entirely destroyed. The father’s business affairs became involved by the strain to put his children on the same plane with those of larger means; debts piled up; everything they had was mortgaged, until even their home was in danger, and was finally lost.

When the inevitable crash came it was found that the mother, in her effort to marry her daughters into families above them, had run up big bills at dressmakers’, milliners’, and florists’, and there was nothing left with which to save the home, which was utterly wrecked.

“Half the world is on the wrong scent in the pursuit of happiness,” said Henry Drummond. “They think it consists in having and getting and in being served by others. It consists in giving and in serving others.”

Happiness is something which is released from our acts, and from our thoughts. A little of it here and a little there is released from our good deeds, our unselfish service, from our right acts and thoughts. Some of it is released every time we help or encourage another soul. A little of it is released when we give a helping hand to those who have fallen under their burdens. A little of it is released from the sacrifices we make for the advantage of others.

We get our happiness just as the bee gets honey. The bee does not find honey ready made. It must work hard for all it gathers. It can only obtain a little from each flower it visits. We do not get happiness ready made. We sip it from the flowers of life, and, like the bee, we must get a little happiness honey here and a little there as we go through the garden of life. It is those who do most of the deeds which release happiness, and get the largest aggregate of them in their lives, who enjoy the most and are the happiest.

Every noble deed, every unselfish act, every bit of helpfulness to others, every good service to humanity, every lofty aspiration and helpful thought, good honest hard work which we love, inevitably brings an amount of happiness which corresponds with the unselfishness and the good intentions of the act.

Happiness is not a monopoly. No one can “corner” it. It is for sale in the market place of life for every one who is willing to pay the price, and that is one which all can pay.

The great mass of people does not extract ten per cent of the happiness possible in their everyday life, largely because they were never trained to think of the normal sources of enjoyment. Their minds are blank, except for the little grooves which their daily routine has stamped in their brain tissue. They are as ignorant of their possible mental resources as the early Indians were of the natural resources of this continent, when the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock.

Ruskin said he was not so much surprised at what we suffer as at what we lose, which might furnish infinite pleasure and satisfaction. We hear a great deal about the enormous loss of our natural resources, the coal, the water power, and the forests,—but they are nothing compared to the loss in the possible resources of happiness all around us.

The things which really make life worth living are very common, and within the reach of all. How often we hear the poor berating the rich whom they envy, bemoaning the cruel fate that has kept about everything worthwhile away from them, but when we stop to take stock of life in the things that are really worthwhile, that count for most, we are pretty nearly all on equal footing.

The great Chemist himself has mixed the atmosphere so that it is just adapted to create health, vigor, robustness of body and thought and exultant feeling for all alike. The sunlight, with its marvelous chemistry, performs millions of miracles every moment in root and rootlet, in plant and flower, in tree, in animal life, in human life, while painting pictures of glorious colorings, in flower, in plant, in landscape. It has an inspiring effect, too, a beneficent influence on all life; it makes all nature rejoice, and it warms the soul of man. “I never look at a sunrise that it does not give me a sunrise feeling,” says John Wanamaker. And this glorious sun is a free gift to all men.

So is time. The poorest, the humblest person on earth has the same amount of precious time as the proudest monarch or the greatest money king. Andrew Carnegie said he would give ten million dollars to have his life prolonged ten years; but all his wealth cannot purchase an instant of time. Nor has money power to purchase the best things of life, love, friendship, sympathy. The sweetest, the most desirable things we know are purchasable only with effort, with right conduct, right thought, right effort.

Lincoln said that “folks are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” The experience of the writer of “Twenty Minutes of Reality,” as well as that of thousands of others that might be cited, shows that the possibilities of happiness are not in things or in the possession of them; that happiness is not outside of us, but inside.

Everywhere people are hunting the world over for what is really in themselves, because everything is tinted, modified, shaped by what we bring to it by our mentality. If we bring beauty to it, we find that it is beautiful. If we bring an ugly mental attitude to it, it is ugly and disappointing. The source of all happiness is inside the individual. The beauty we see in nature and the beauty we feel in music are inside of us. We all know how all nature, the very landscape, seems to laugh with us when we rejoice, seems to exult with us when we are glad, and the very sun and the flowers seem to reflect our joy.

The world is a whispering gallery which sends back the echo of our own voice. It is a mirror which reflects the face that looks in it. If we laugh, it laughs back; if we frown, it reflects a frown.

Happiness is the reaction of our mental attitude and our acts upon others. It is what they fling back to us that makes us happy or miserable. The door between us and Heaven or happiness cannot be open when the door between us and our fellow men is closed.

Right thinking means right action. If we would only hold the right thought, the constructive thought, the happy thought, the joy thought, the helpful thought, the unselfish thought each day, we should all soon become supremely happy, because, finally, happiness is a mental state. Your degree of happiness or misery today is merely a resultant of your thought. If such a large part of our days were not filled with discordant thoughts, worry thoughts, fear thoughts, envy, jealousy, hatred thoughts, perhaps half unconsciously much of the time, we would be happy instead of miserable.

“Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” When we realize the kingdom of God or heaven, that is, the kingdom of harmony, we are in a position to attract everything else that is desirable. Christ meant that when we have put ourselves into harmony with the great Source of supply, when we have become conscious of our oneness with the One, in other words, when we reach the cosmic consciousness, we are right in the midst of the all-supply.

One would think that after all these centuries of searching for happiness it would have been found by the great mass of human beings, but how few have yet found it! We have not found it because we have not understood the perfect truth of Christ’s philosophy, “The kingdom of God is within you.”

All through history man has been hunting for this kingdom of God outside of himself. Multitudes have thought that wealth would furnish the key to this kingdom, which would supply all of his wants. He has looked for this marvelous paradise everywhere but the right place,— within himself.

Divinely fathered and mothered by his Maker, placed in an earthly paradise, infinitely more beautiful, more glorious than any human imagination could conceive, made lord over a world filled with everything necessary to make human beings ideally happy and ideally successful, yet, after centuries of race evolution, centuries of groping after ideal conditions, centuries of searching for his highest good, man is still dissatisfied. The average man is a god playing the fool. He is still looking for happiness outside of himself.

If we had found the kingdom of heaven within, our faces would be so lighted up that we would give the impression to everybody we met that we had just come into possession of some great good fortune, something that had made us exquisitely happy.

You know how pleased people appear when they have come into possession of that which they have struggled for all their lives, people who have perhaps been poor and tried hard to get on, but who barely managed to make a living, and have suddenly fallen heirs to a fortune. How changed the appearance of the whole family! There is an unwonted light in their eyes. Hope has taken the place of despair. Buoyancy and gayety have taken the place of heaviness and gloom. In other words, they have all at once become new creatures. The light of happiness shines through their flesh, looks out of their eyes.

This is how we should all impress one another. Instead of looking miserable and forlorn, God’s children ought to look as though they were supremely happy. Their physical eyes should reflect an entrancing beauty which their inward eyes should behold. Through their faces should shine that inner vision which the soul should sense. If we had found the kingdom of heaven within us the countenance of every human being would reflect a superb satisfaction, a harmony, a blessedness which only very few mortals have ever yet reflected.

It is possible for every one to have that harmonious spirit which finds serenity and true happiness in the life he is living daily, through the resources of his own soul. The new philosophy is not that of happiness postponed to a future life, but happiness to be realized here and now—not a far away personal immortality, but immortality in an increasingly happier humanity.

One of the most unfortunate things that ever happened to the race was the teaching of the doctrine that heaven is not to be enjoyed on earth, that it is something way beyond, and that we must die to reach it.

The whole teaching of the theologians looked towards the life beyond, the life to come, every desirable thing was in the future. The present was not anything like as important to them as the future. Man was simply passing through a very disagreeable probationary state which was to decide his future for all eternity. Life was a very serious matter to them, and religion was still more serious.

The theologians of the past never dreamed that happiness is one of the great essentials of living; one that plays a tremendous part in health, efficiency and general normality. Many of them thought that the tendency to play was an indication of satanic tendencies which were subversive of religion. They didn’t think man had any right in this probationary period of his existence to spend precious time in playing. It never seemed to occur to them that the suppression of the play instinct develops abnormal tendencies which often lead to insanity and degeneracy.

Practically all of the Puritans suffered from the curse of fear, which darkened all their lives. The majority of them did not know what real happiness meant. Their faces wore an anxious and sad expression. There was little or no joy in their lives because their natural love of humor and fun was constantly suppressed.

Think of the effect on a sensitive mind of the belief that an infant which had not been baptized, though it had never come to the years of understanding, did not know how to reason, and knew nothing about religion, could be punished forever and ever, and that hell was paved with infants’ skulls! It was such a horrible doctrine to inject into the child nature that it seems unthinkable such a thing could be possible.

For centuries the clergy were constantly cautioning men and women against the play instinct, reminding them that it was the food of evil forces. A long, sober, sad face was regarded as a sign of piety. People who laughed and played much, who enjoyed having a good time, were believed to be on the road to destruction, and were often told that the devil was after them.

There was a great deal of the sad and morose in the old theology. Think of men living in unventilated cloisters, breathing impure air, living in an absolutely abnormal way, almost entirely secluded from human society, and suppressing completely their normal instincts, writing theology, making creeds for the great throbbing mass of humanity! These men were in no condition to produce anything that was normal for they were not normal themselves. Christ did not seclude himself, he lived in the open, mingled with the common people, was one with them. What he taught was natural, was wholesome. But what a monk in a cloister, shut out from the world, apart from active life, not in touch at all with the mass of his fellow creatures, could produce under such conditions could not be anything but sad, morose, abnormal, not at all suited to people who were living normally.

The saddest note in human life has been the theological note, and nothing has been so distorted, so garbled, and so botched as the theologians’ idea of man’s relation to his God.

The Creator made man for a normal life of work and enjoyment, made him to be gloriously happy. He made him to be whole, strong, and ideally perfect. Any deviation from God’s plan is man’s fault.

Did you ever stop to think how many times the sacred writers told us to be glad, to rejoice always? In “Pollyanna” the play which for months held immense audiences in New York spellbound, Pollyanna, that child of gladness, says: “If God took the trouble to tell us eight hundred times to be glad and rejoice, He must want us to do it—some.”

“Rejoice evermore.” “Let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord,” “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say rejoice.” “And your joy no man shall take from you.” “And your joy shall be full.”

Again and again these and similar expressions are repeated all through the Bible. We are not only told to rejoice and be glad, but “to rejoice and be exceeding glad.” Surely God must have meant it—some. Struggles, disappointments, difficulties, are not meant to make us sad, but to make us strong—for if we don’t whine and complain, we shall be given strength to overcome all these.

When I hear people grumbling and complaining about trifles and magnifying molehills into mountains, I always think of an old lady whose life had been full of sorrows and disappointments, but who never lost her cheerfulness and serenity. Being asked one day the secret of her sweet optimism, she replied, “I keep a pleasure book. Early in life, I resolved that every night I would record some pleasant experience which had come to me during the day. This has given me the habit of looking for the glad things instead of the sad ones in my life. And so, no matter how dark the clouds, I have always been able to see a bit of sunlight shining through.”

Many days, she said, it was hard to see the light because she had had a large family, and had lost every member of it. In addition she had much illness, and many financial losses which left her very poor. But in spite of her afflictions and her poverty she had managed to find something to be thankful for every day of her life.

People who take life sadly, who see nothing “to rejoice and be glad” about, not only lose a tremendous amount of pleasure, real enjoyment, but they seriously cripple their ability and impair their success. They are not normal, and, therefore, cannot reach their maximum of strength and efficiency.

When I see people with gloomy minds attuned to sadness, who dwell exclusively on the serious side of life, I always feel like turning them around so that they will face towards the light, so that they will look at life in a hopeful, expectant, happy way, and let their shadows all fall behind them.

Mr. Schwab has always been a splendid example of the philosophy of happiness. He is one of the happiest men I have ever met! In his younger days when he was struggling to get a foothold in business he was always bubbling over with happiness. This constant flow of good spirits was one of the first things that attracted Mr. Carnegie’s attention. In the days of strike troubles at the Homestead works it was young Schwab’s merry temper that kept Mr. Carnegie from giving way to serious despondency. When the ironmaster felt very blue over the situation, the young man would sing Scotch songs for him and cheer him up, so that Mr. Carnegie would slap him on the shoulder and say, “You’re all right, Charles, you’re all right !“

Over-seriousness depresses the mental faculties and tends to lower efficiency. It is the man who sings at his work, the one who is bubbling over with gladness, with a sense of abounding vitality that is the normal, healthful, successful man.

Life should be full of play, even of fun, full of light and cheer. It would be if we knew how to live. If, like the old lady who kept the pleasure book, and Pollyanna, the glad girl, we make a habit of looking for something to be glad about, we shall very soon master the secret of happiness.

Let us “rejoice and be glad.” Let us cry with Pollyanna, “Just be glad—that’s the game.”

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