Make the most of your happiness, and the least of your sorrows. Use the telescope at the enlarging end for the former and at the reducing end for the latter, until you have learned what most of us have to _learn_--how foolish and wrong it is to make our joys mere _incidents_ while we make our sorrows _events_.
I want to radiate a joy in the little things of to-day. Most people live in anticipation. The things of to-day are not enough. It is, "Oh, tomorrow--next week--next year--will surely bring me my heart's desire!" Let us learn that _to-day_ is the fulfillment of the heart's desire. Take to-day _all_ it brings, and it will make _to-day_ so full that you will have no care for the joys of anticipation. Live _now_, so intensely, so fully, that life _to-day_ will be compelled to deliver up all its treasures _to-day_. Hence every day becomes a perfect joy.
I want to radiate _inspiration_. I do not believe the idea that the saints of old who wrote "the Bible," are the only examples of inspiration. God inspires every good man and good woman, and all good in all people comes from Him, for He is the original source.
A self-centered life is a selfish life; a life that gives of itself freely and fully to all with whom it comes in contact is a life of inspiration--it is a radiating center of inspiration. It inspires to courage, to higher endeavor, to larger achievement. I need all this for myself, but I also long and desire to inspire it in others. Many a life seems to have inspiration for the carrying out of its own dreams, ambitions, desires, but none to give away. Yet the lives we touch may need just the impetus, the propelling force--light or vigorous--that we can give to enable the fulfillment in them of half dormant ambitions for good, the attainment of noble endeavor.
What would become of the chick in the egg if the mother hen did not brood over it? She forgets her own desires to move about in the stronger desire to bring into active being the hidden lives within the eggs. Let us "brood" over the souls of men and women, young men and maidens, boys and girls, and quicken to life the dormant powers of the weak, the tender. Aspirations may have begun in them that can only be quickened by warmth and love from outside. Oh, for wisdom, as well as love, to "brood" aright.