WHILE THE KETTLE BOILS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 55, 12 July 1940, Page 41

WHILE THE KETTLE BOILS

Dear Friends, While writing this letter to you, I have in mind a very charming lady in her late fifties. She has one fault, and if she reads this she will understand. She lives almost completely in the past. Her young days were full and colourful, and now that she has reached a placid corner of life, her eyes and thoughts are constantly turning backwards. The good old days! What a familiar and really boring expression. Our good days are the present in which we live; born out of our own achievement and effort. Those people who sigh for the good old days forget: their imagination plays them tricks in painting the past rosier than it actually was. Time has a way of erasing the memory of uncomfortable moments and leaving us in contented possession of the pleasant ones. The early Victorian Miss was a very delightful person, a paragon of all the graces; gentle, maidenly, modest. A cocktail or a risqué joke were meaningless. terms to her. She moved in a comfortable, padded world that protected her from all the rude jars and bumps of hustling progress. But Miss 1940 scorns such frailty. She faces facts. Her eyes are wide and fearless as her outlook on life. She never shrinks from an issue; she accepts it with a challenge. She knows that to-day it is not alone a man’s but a woman’s world as well, and she strives earnestly to earn her own little place in it. I am not attempting here a serious discussion of the past. and to-day, Perhaps it can be termed best a barter or exchange. What we have lost in grace and leisure we have gained in a fuller, more vigorous living.

But to return to this question of grousing. Married women are often the main offenders. Mrs. Middleman looks back and bewails the fact that she has not the pretty things to wear or the same money to spend as in her single days. She overlooks the fact that she dressed then-and quite rightly so-to attract some nice man her way, and when she got him, she gained at the same time security and protection. Not such a bad exchange for extra pin-money and a pretty frock, when you come to work it out. Women, at heart, are incurably romantic, They are apt to look back on some romantic affair, and to wonder in their secret hearts if he was not the right one after all. Don’t you believe it, Mrs. Middleman, it is only your romantic nature playing you tricks. The one you chose, if you are a serious-minded person, is the one to whom your heart really belongs. The other affair looks glamorous in retrospect, but even glamour wears thin when you live and eat with it three times a day. So be content with what you’ve got. Once we realise the futility of living in the past, we can grasp with firmer, surer hands the happiness of the present-and our future will be fuller and more secure. This little quotation, I think, answers everything: " Happiness is the gift of seeing the good things of life in such high reliet that the rest is unimportant." Yours cordially,

Cynthia