Being and Doing – 12 April – Giving Pleasure

A LITTLE thought will show you how vastly your own happiness depends on the way other people bear themselves towards you.  The looks and tones at your breakfast table, the conduct of your fellow-workers or employers, the faithful or unreliable men you deal with, what people say to you on the street, the way your cook and housemaid do their work, the letters you get, the friends or foes you meet, -these things make up very much of the pleasure or misery of your day.  Turn the idea around, and remember that just so much are you adding to the pleasure or the misery of other people’s days.  And this is the half of the matter which you can control.  Whether any particular day shall bring to you more of happiness or of suffering is largely beyond your power to determine.  Whether each day of your life shall give happiness or suffering rests with yourself.

G. S. MERRIAM

We do not always perceive that even the writing of a note of congratulation, the fabrication of something intended as an offering of affection, our necessary intercourse with characters which have no congeniality with our own, or hours apparently trifled away in the domestic circle, may be made by us the performance of a most sacred and blessed work; even the carrying out, after our feeble measure, of the design of God for the increase of happiness.

From Anna

oooOOOooo