|
12.
To know that it is the middle ground that brings
pleasure and satisfaction, and that excesses have to be
paid for ofttimes with heavy and sometimes with frightful
costs.
ALL
things, good in themselves, are for use and enjoyment; but
all things must be rightly used in order that there may be
full and lasting enjoyment.
A law written into the very fibre of human life, so
to speak, is to the effect that excesses, the abuse of
anything good in itself, will end disastrously, so that
one's pleasures and enjoyments will have to be gathered up
for repairs, or perchance his shattered mind or body also,
and in case of the latter then the former will have to
bide their time or wait indefinitely for their resumption.
Wise
indeed is he who fully recognizes this law that never has
and that never will allow itself to be violated or undone,
but that will shatter, sometimes with telling and open
blows, more often perhaps with blows subtle and guarded,
but just as telling, the happiness or even the mind and
the body of the one who would do violence to or who would
fail to recognize its mandate— Moderation.
On
the other hand, to see evil in things good in themselves
is the perversion of another law that carries with it its
own peculiar penalty.
The one tends to make the prig, the self-righteous,
out of a good, wholesome man or woman, the same as the
other makes eventually the voluptuary.
|
|
|
The one errs in the one direction the same as the
other in another direction. Each pays the penalty for his folly, the one by cutting
himself off from much innocent and valuable God intended
enjoyment, at the same time casting a continual shadow
over the lives of others; the other by way of settling
heavy bills of costs for his excesses.
It
should be then neither license nor perverted use on the
one hand, nor asceticism or priggishness on the
other—the full use of all normal and natural functions,
faculties, and powers, innocent and good in themselves,
that all may be brought to their fullest growth and
development, but never excessive or perverted use.
The
tendency of the great majority, especially in our
present-day American life, is on the side of the too
serious, the too busy, the too absorbing in the business,
in the work. This
induces all unconsciously, in time, a prevailing type of
thought and mental activity that takes, so to speak, the
buoyancy, the elasticity out of both mind and body, so
that age and its accompanying features manifest, assert,
and fix themselves in many, or to speak more truly, in the
majority of cases, long before their time.
By way of balance, by way of disarming these, we
need more of the play element, more of the open air, the
sunshine, the exercise element in our lives.
It would save thousands from stiffening of joints
and muscles, hardened arteries, dyspepsia, apoplexy, nerve
exhaustion, melancholia, premature age, premature death.
''Happy
recreation has a very subtle influence upon one's ability,
which is emphasized and heightened and multiplied by it.
How our courage is braced up, our determination,
our ambition, our whole outlook on life changed by it!
There seems to be a subtle fluid from humor and fun
which penetrates the entire being, bathes all the mental
faculties, and washes out the brain-ash and debris from
exhausted cerebrum and muscles. . . . A joyful, happy,
fun-loving environment develops powers, resources, and
possibilities which would remain latent in a cold, dull,
repressing atmosphere."
Look
where we will, in or out and around us, we will find that
it is the middle ground—neither poverty nor excessive
riches, good wholesome use without license, a turning into
the bye-ways along the main road where innocent and
healthy God-sent and God-intended pleasures and enjoyments
are to be found; but never getting far enough away to lose
sight of the road itself. The middle ground it is that the
wise man or woman plants foot upon.
|
