Saturday, June 13, 2015

How To Improve Your Life, 1910

“How to Live” from the Thursday, June 16, 1910, issue of the Watauga Democrat.

Very few people know how to live. With the majority, life is a bare existence, colorless and sodden. With strange perversity they choose the grub state and remain in it, when they might, if they would, have wings and enter upon joys unnumbered.

Bound to the earth by self imposed burdens, encumbered by cares and worries for which they have no one to blame but themselves, they rail at Providence or fate because of the emptiness of their lives. It is a sad condition to which they thus bring themselves, and to the onlooker it is hard to say which they deserve more, blame or pity.

How tame and empty is the life of most country people! What wretched houses some of them live in, and how utterly devoid of all pleasure are the women folk of those homes! None of them knows anything about the fullness or sweetness of life. These are to be pitied, but their husbands and fathers are to be blamed. When is the good of money if it is not used to make life comfortable and pleasant? Why should a man starve his soul and the souls of his wife and children for the sake of riches?

Why postpone to the future what ought to be done today? The time will come when this grubbing for money for mere money’s sake will be seen to have been a dreadful blunder. The children raised up in ignorance and under conditions without a single refining influence, the wife old and spent or dead because of overwork, what then will one’s money be worth? The soul of all have been starved for lack of beauty, the appreciation of which the wealth of the world cannot now give. This is a beautiful planet on which we live, but only a few of us know it, because we have never been trained to look for its beauties. Our lives are pitched on a low plane, and with the most of us our life is that of the ox or the ass.—Farmers Union Sun.

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