How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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190 (canvas 210)
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subject ” is one of the emergency devices of the human
mind. A great deal of significance and happiness may
be attained by participation in a sport, appropriate to
your physical constitution and your available time.
There is a very real sense of goodness and happiness
to be derived from the playing of golf or tennis, from
riding a horse, or sailing a boat. The more decentralized
and depersonalized our civilization becomes, the less
each individual is granted the opportunities for achieving
significance and a sense of goodness in his work or social
relations. The importance of having some athletic
activity in which one can experience the goodness of one’s
body in action, and a sense of wholesome fatigue, is all
the greater in our machine age when robust physical
struggle is almost unknown.
Of Basic Philosophies
There remains one important device by which we train
ourselves to the attainment of our goal, and effect the
exclusion of unnecessary or interfering experiences. It is
perhaps the most difficult of all these devices to discuss
in a book devoted to the bare outlines of the art of being
human. This device is the elaboration of a psychic map
of the world and a mental plan of campaign. We
construct and utilize such a plan during the entire course
of our lives. For want of a better word this scheme of
orientation is called religion by some, a working
philosophy of life or Weltanschauung by others. Obviously
a man’s attitude to the cosmos and his relation to the
world in which he lives must bear the stamp of the unit
pattern of his personality, and must give us the most
profound insight into his own interpretation of his
position in the world. While each man’s philosophy of
life must of necessity be an individual formula, human
beings tend to group themselves in a small number of
categories according to their philosophy of life.
Every philosophy of life is a plan of campaign as well
as a guiding formula for the progress of the personality
toward its individual goal. The relation of this map