DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 33, 2 May 1927, Page 14

DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

THANKSGIVING (Copyright, 1927.) is no normal man that is entirely satisfied. If we are going A to wait until all our desires are gratified in order to be thankful, the time will never arrive. Happiness is a relative term. You are happy because you are better off than some people and unhappy because you are not so well off as others. It is to our credit that so many people live happy and cheerful lives, although those about them have more of this world’s goods than they. The poor man gets along very well in his little cottage notwithstanding the fact that the millionaire across the road lives in a palace. The right sort of man is not made comfortable especially by seeing other people uncomfortable. Happiness is largely the product of our imagination. If we spend our lives imagining how much better off we might be we shall be miserable. It is easy to turn the imagination the other way and think how much worse it might be for us. This produces in us a feeling of well being. A healthy man ought to be glad simply to be alive. All things should be of interest to him. Robert Louis Stevenson said that he was never bored in his life. Everybody he met taught him something. Everyone was his superior in some respects and he could learn from him. He was the same who wrote that “this world is so full of a number of things I am sure we should all be as happy as kings.” One thing that should be remembered is that our capacity for happiness is directly in proportion to our capacity for suffering. When we cannot suffer acutely we can hardly behappy acutely. The happiness that comes from indifference or coldness or from lack of imagination is hardly to be desired. We may look over the sty sometiimes and envy the pigs who have nothing to think of but to stuff themselves with swill, but the human soul is so capacious that it cannot be happy with mere material comfort. The problem of culture is to remove man’s satisfactions over from his material enjoyment to his spiritual. The more a man lives among the spiritualities and gets his enjoyment from them the more of a man he becomes.