How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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ask a porter. She sat weeping silently in a corner of the
waiting room, a picture of forlorn perplexity. My patient
managed to find her daughter’s address in the telephone
directory, took the old lady and her b&gs and put her in
a taxicab, and accompanied her to an obscure street.
On the way he stopped and bought the old lady a few
roses—the first that had ever been given her.
He deposited her, smiling between her tears, in her
daughter’s house, and rushed to a telephone. “ My God,
Doctor, I feel like a human being at last ! ” he blurted
as he told us the story. Thereafter, he became a figure
haunting the waiting room at the station, a sort of
modern Haroun-al-Raschid. Every Christmas he sends
the old lady of his first adventure in constructive humanity
a dozen of the finest roses he can buy. Since then he has
become one of the directors of a boys’ club, and a member
of various child welfare and civic organizations.
The Vital Need for Hobbies
We should expand our occupational interests at the
same time we attempt to extend our social horizons.
The business of being busy is one of the most important
in the life of a human being. Those sad human beings
who do not have to work are to be pitied if they do not
find some avocation to divert their energies into a useful
channel. A great many agencies and individuals set
themselves up nowadays as vocational guidance experts,
and after elaborate tests they direct their clients to this,
that, or the other occupation. In most cases they lose sight
of the essential fact that the well-adjusted person finds
work a source of salvation, and therefore has already
found the proper vocation for himself.
Most of the people who seek vocational guidance really
need to have the psychological reasons for work explained
to them, so that, seeing work as a veritable source of
personal expansion and self-esteem, they find the nearest
and best occupation available, and devote themselves to it.
The choice is really one between working and not