(Another Monday. Back to the old job. Again. For some, today is the first of five days at the old grind. For others, it’s the beginning of five days of excitement, of opportunity. For some today just starts a work week. For others it’s another day to fulfill a calling—and the approach is completely different. Dr. Crane might have written this for those who go forth on Mondays, as he considers—-)
THE JOY OF WORK
If you examine carefully all of the supposed joys of life you will find the most enduring, satisfactory and real joy is work.
But to be joyful, work must be the kind you like.
And work, to be liked, must have two elements.
First, it must call into play one’s full, normal activities.
And second, it must be the creating of something.
The truest happiness is found in the most complete exercise of our powers.
Children are happy because they are doing with all their might everything they can do. Arms, legs, lungs, are busy every waking moment.
Laziness, drunkenness, sensuality are diseases that come on later in life. Those that indulge in are happy only by fevered spells. Between these they are consumed by restlessness, doubt, ennui, and despair.
The great mass of men are happy most of the time because they have their necessary work. And where a man finds his right work it is the same to him that play is to a child.
Look at this busy humanity, doctors and lawyers, farmers, merchants and clerks, letter carriers, engineers, masons, carpenters, writers and house mothers! Out of them, as a mighty chorus, arises the hymn of “The joy lf living.”
Life is pleasant because it is functioning normally.
Life is a burden only when it ceases to function.
Every faculty cries for something to do. The brain must think, plan, organize, project, imagine, reason, compare, decide.
When it has no real business upon which to use these motions, we load it with artificial concerns, such as novels, plays, and travel sites, to sill its clamor and craving. But the people who are amusing their brains are not so happy as those who are using their brains.
It is better to play at work than to work at play.
The muscles demand something to do. When we refuse them, they breed poison in us. They curse us with gout and rheumatism, and biliousness.
The stomach, liver, heart, and lungs all demand steady employment. Give us work, they shout, or we will go on strike. They are more cantankerous than a labor union when they are refused employment.
The eye wants work. We must have someone to love, someone to revere, something to suffer and to overcome.
Tannhauser grew weary in the lap of Venus; he longed for human strife and sorrow.
And a perfect hell would be a place where every sense is lulled, every appetite is gorged, where there is eternal rest and nothing forever and ever to do.
Joy is a function of activity.
Soul and body pray for dangers, crises, tasks.
Perfect joy circles as a halo the brow of the worker and the fighter.
“To him that overcometh will I give the morning star.”