Happiness Can Be Addictive

The highest happiness must always come from the exercise of the best thing in us. When we find happiness in anything but useful work, we will be the first man or woman to make the discovery. If we take an inventory of ourselves at the very outset of our career we will find that we think we are going to find happiness in money, what money will buy or what it will give us in the way of power, influence, comforts, and luxuries.

We think we are going to find a great deal of happiness in marriage. How quickly we find that the best happiness we will ever know is that we must be limited to our own capacity for enjoyment, that our happiness can not come from anything outside of us but must be developed from within.

Many people believe we are going to find much of our happiness in books, in travel, in leisure, in freedom from the thousand and one anxieties and cares and worries of business; but the moment we get in the position where we think we would have freedom of other things come up in our minds and cut off much of the expected joy. When we get money and leisure we often find that we are growing selfish, which cuts off a lot of our happiness as we know.

No one able to work can be idle without feeling a sense of guilt at not doing his part in the world, for every time we see the poor laboring people who are working for someone else, who are working everywhere, he is constantly reminded of his meanness in shifting upon others what he is able to do and out to do themselves. Idleness is the last place to look for happiness. Idleness is like a stagnant pool. The moment the water ceases to flow, to work, to do something, all sorts of vermin and hideous creatures develop in it.

In the same way work is the only thing that will keep the individual healthy and wholesome and clean. An idle brain very quickly breeds impurities. The married man quickly learns that his domestic happiness depends upon what he himself contributes to the marriage, that he can not take out a great deal without putting a great deal in, for selfishness always reaps a mean, despicable harvest. It is only the generous giver who who gets more in return.

There is nothing in which will so shrivel up an individual; and contract his capacity for happiness and selfishness. It is always a fatal blighter, blaster, dis-appointer. We must give to get, we must be great before we can get great enjoyment; great in our motive, grand in our endeavor, sublime in our ideas.