How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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sense of adventure while their faculties are sharp should be apparent. Hunger, love, and curiosity are probably the most irresistible of human urges, and life without adventure is a pallid life indeed. Take a chance. Buy a new picture for your room, enrol in a new course, take that trip you have so long planned, even though you cannot do it as you desired. Buy that car even though it is a second-hand Austin Seven. Sit in the gallery and see that play, or listen to that concert. Do not defer life. The dividends of too much caution and security are boredom and smugness. It is better to have adventured in life and made mistakes, than to have petrified in mind and body in the secure depths of an easy chair, with an horizon bounded by your office, the daily paper, and the four walls of your home. Only the dead know complete security. One of the 'chief differences between the life pattern of the child and that of the adult is the element of plan- fulness. The mentally mature man develops a plan of conduct, a grand strategy of living which consists not only in an immediate plan of attack on the problems of the present, but a secondary scheme for maintaining the position gained in maturity throughout old age. The child (whether in age or in mental immaturity) lives a planless life. His strategy consists either in muddling through or dreaming through life. How to Grow Old Gracefully It must be apparent that the chances of happiness are much greater when an individual makes provision for his old age during his maturity. The socially responsible, mature individual cannot bear the thought of reverting to the helplessness of childhood when the relatively greater helplessness of old age will affect him, whereas the grass¬ hopper characters among men, never having outgrown their childhood, place their faith in God, in society, or in luck, and make no responsible provision for their last