The Majesty of Calmness; individual problems and posibilities — John Shaqi
The Majesty of Calmness; individual problems and posibilitiesJordan, William George
Philosophy
The Majesty of Calmness; individual problems and posibilities
Jordan, William George
Character; Conduct of life
Hurry is a counterfeit of haste. Haste has an ideal, a distinct aim to
be realized by the quickest, direct methods. Haste has a single compass
upon which it relies for direction and in harmony with which its course
is determined. Hurry says: "I must move faster. I will get three
compasses; I will have them different; I will be guided by all of them.
One of them will probably be right." Hurry never realizes that slow,
careful foundation work is the quickest in the end.
Hurry has ruined more Americans than has any other word in the
vocabulary of life. It is the scourge of America; and is both a cause
and a result of our high-pressure civilization. Hurry adroitly assumes
so many masquerades of disguise that its identity is not always
recognized.
Hurry always pays the highest price for everything, and, usually the
goods are not delivered. In the race for wealth men often sacrifice
time, energy, health, home, happiness and honor,--everything that money
cannot buy, the very things that money can never bring back. Hurry is a
phantom of paradoxes. Business men, in their desire to provide for the
future happiness of their family, often sacrifice the present happiness
of wife and children on the altar of Hurry. They forget that their
place in the home should be something greater than being merely "the
man that pays the bills;" they expect consideration and thoughtfulness
that they are not giving.
We hear too much of a wife's duties to a husband and too little of the
other side of the question. "The wife," they tell us, "should meet her
husband with a smile and a kiss, should tactfully watch his moods and
be ever sweetness and sunshine." Why this continual swinging of the
censer of devotion to the man of business? Why should a woman have to
look up with timid glance at the face of her husband, to "size up his
mood"? Has not her day, too, been one of care, and responsibility, and
watchfulness? Has not mother-love been working over perplexing problems
and worries of home and of the training of the children that wifely
love may make her seek to solve in secret? Is man, then, the weaker sex
that he must be pampered and treated as tenderly as a boil trying to
keep from contact with the world?
In their hurry to attain some ambition, to gratify the dream of a life,
men often throw honor, truth, and generosity to the winds. Politicians
dare to stand by and see a city poisoned with foul water until they
"see where they come in" on a water-works appropriation. If it be
necessary to poison an army,--that, too, is but an incident in the
hurry for wealth.
This is the Age of the Hothouse. The element of natural growth is
pushed to one side and the hothouse and the force-pump are substituted.
Nature looks on tolerantly as she says: "So far you may go, but no
farther, my foolish children."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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