Life changes so gradually that we do not realize our progress. This small triumph of yesterday we fail to recognize as the summit of the mountain at whose foot we encamped several years ago in despair. We forget our hopes and wistfulness and struggles. We do not look down from the summit at the valley where we started, and thus we lose the dramatic sense of something accomplished. If a man looking back sees no mountain and valley, but only a straight level plain, it behooves him to take himself straight to some other spiritual country where there is opportunity for climbing and where five years hence will see him on a higher level, breathing purer air. Most people have no trouble in remembering their rights and their wrongs, their pretensions and their ambitions,--things so illusory that they should never even have been thought of. But to forget their progress, to forget their golden moments, their acquisitions of insight and appreciation, the charm of their friends, the sequence of their ideals,--this is indeed a deplorable aphasia! “The days that make us happy make us wise!” Happiness is too valuable to be forgotten, and who will remember yours if you forget it? It is what has made the best of you; or, if you have thrown it away from memory, what could have made you, and made you richer than you are. If you have neglected such contemplation, you are poor, and that poverty will be apparent in your daily personality. Life in its essence is a heaping-up and accumulation of thought and insight. It should mount higher and higher, and be more potent and flowering as life is lived. If you do not keep in your memory and spirit the finer accumulations of your life, it will be as if you had only partly lived. Your living will be a travesty on life, and your progress only a dull mechanical routine. Even though your life may be outwardly routine, inwardly, as moralists have always known, it may be full of adventure. Be happy, but not too contented. Contentment may be a vice as well as a virtue; too often it is a mere cover for sluggishness, and not a sign of triumph. The mind must have a certain amount of refreshment and novelty; it will not grow by staying too comfortably at home, and refusing to put itself to the trouble of travel and change. It needs to be disturbed every now and then to keep the crust from forming. People do not realize this, and let themselves become jaded and uninterested--and therefore uninteresting--when such a small touch of novelty would inspire and stimulate them. A tired interest, in a healthy mind, wakes with as quick a response to a new touch or aspect as does a thirsty flower to the rain. Too many people sit in prison with themselves until they get meagre and dull, when the door was really all the time open, and outside was freshness and green grass and the warm sun, which might have revived them and made them bright again. Listlessness in an old man or woman is often the telltale sign of such an imprisonment.