Outline:
- The wrong notion of serious people
- The love of cheerfulness
- The optimistic attitude
- The wonders of a good laugh
- The scarcity of laughter in our daily life
Many people have ruined their power of laughter. They have no rebound, no elasticity. To them the sense of humour is a weakness. Life is a thing to be taken seriously, they say. These people feel the weight of the woes of the world. They are loaded down with this responsibility. They cannot understand how anybody can take such a light, flippant view of life as to spend time in fun making. They give us the impression that the whole universe would stop. They go around; with a serious aggrieved air as though the world rested upon their shoulders. They should know
that happiness is scattered round them. They can find it everywhere. There is no cause for being unhappy.
No matter what their work may be, they should learn to find happiness everywhere. The love of cheerfulness can be cultivated life any other faculty, and in practical life, it will be worth more to them than a college education without it. This is wealth that can accumulate the wealth of joy.
[the_ad id=”17141″]Not matter how hard their lot, how dark the day may seem, if they work a little good humour into it, it will lift their life above a humdrum existence. It will relieve the grind and dreariness. If they manage to get in a good laugh during day, their work will not seem nearly as hard. A dull, serious mood will not only make them very uninteresting to other, but it makes their own load go hard.
A good laugh does away with cares, worries, doubts and relieves the great strain of modern life. If there is anyone who bores us, it is the man who has no fun in him, who can never see a joke, who has no sense of the ludicrous as to find something to excite laughter every hour of every day.
“Better a mind too small than one too serious”.
Give us the joy which is independent of circumstances and which lifts us above even an iron environment.
“Smile once in a while.”
It will make your heart seem lighter. Life’s mirror; if we smile, smiles come back to greet us; If we’re frowning all the while, frowns forever meet us.
“You are on the shady side of seventy, I expect,” someone said to an old gentleman. “No, I am on the sunny side of it,” he replied.
What a sad thing it is to go into the slums and see sober, anxious looks upon the faces of many children, who ought to be all sunshine, radiating gladness. Joy has been crushed out of their little lives.
One who studies the faces of business and professional men in our cities cannot but be impressed with their seriousness. Even in restaurants, at lunch counters, men do not forget the serious side of life. They eat with long faces. They are thinking, thinking, worrying, worrying, planning and planning. Their almighty money is a serious subject, forbidding laughter.
A great many people never learn to laugh heartily. A sort of half smile is as far as they ever get. If children get a little boisterous, they are hushed. Their lives are suppressed in sad, serious homes until they almost lose the power of spontaneous laughter.
