How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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Hobbies there are without end. They are one of the
most effective forms of insurance against the boredom of
old age or the heavy artillery of adversity. No man can
afford to be without a hobby, and so long as his hobbies
are subordinate to his life work, the more hobbies the
better. There is hardly a device which is such an effective
prophylaxis against subjectivity or melancholia as a
hobby, it matters not whether you cultivate dahlias or raise
goldfish. The wise man has a variety of avocations—
outdoor hobbies and indoor, summer and winter ones,
social and solitary forms of amusing himself in his leisure
moments. No one with a good hobby is ever lonely for a
long time. A good hobby is one of the best possible
bridges between the social and the vocational worlds.
“ Either ... or” v. “ Both . . . and ”
One of the essential differences between the mentally
immature and the emotionally adult lies in their attitude
toward perfection. Perfection is a curse, and the cult
of perfection, that is, living according to the motto of
“ one hundred per cent or nothing ” restricts men
and women to the narrowest spheres of isolation.
Perfectionism is the blinker that keeps many a man on
the path of failure. Only in the child’s world, or in the
cosmology of the savage and the neurotic, do the finalities
of “ all or none ”, of “ either—or ”, of “ large or small ”,
“ right or wrong ”, exist as veritable entities.
In the world of mature men there are no finalities.
Everything is relative. The emotionally mature adult
lives according to the law of “ Both . . . and ”. For
the romantically infantile, fixed and absolute standards
of right and wrong exist, but the completely adult
individual realizes that right and wrong are elastic con¬
ventions, variable with time and place and circumstance.
He seeks to understand rather than to label. He seeks
to join together in creative inventive'ness rather than to
disjoin in romantic idealism.
This realization leads to important conclusions with