“The secret of charm,” wrote the famous psychologist of Harvard, William James, “is emotional directness. It consists in direct emotional communication with others…with total honesty, with sincerity, with deep concern, and without guile.”
This quality is admittedly rather rare today. The tensions of modern life and an artificial civilization tend to diminish rather than promote such qualities. An artificial charm of man-made attractiveness is substituted too often. But there is no charm that can hold so long or so fast as that of a sincere and radiant personality, aglow with naturalness and poise.
One can and should refuse to allow the hurry and bustle of modern life to hinder him from taking time to really live. What, after all, is life for if it is not to be lived for one’s friends and those who need him. Millions are so busy making a living that they have utterly failed to make a life of real worth. They make virtually no contribution to the true values of life such as character development in the young about them, or in the giving of time to spiritual and social interests for the betterment of their friends and neighbors.
Life has become entirely too much a race between the factory, office, shop, or store. Home is a sort of boarding house where the family meets each other hurriedly in brief successions at the table. Many families are scarcely ever together for a whole day at once. How can we develop real fellowship and genuine personal interests in each other in such “hit-and-miss” patterns of living?
Take time out to listen to others talk; be sympathetically sincere in your interest in another’s problem; allow the beauties of life to look in at the windows of your soul. Keep gentle in spirit. Be radiant in hopefulness and impart each day some cheerfulness to others. Take time out, man, and live a little before you go to your Maker with a handful of chaff which you have caught in your haste, while missing the wheat!
--William S. Deal
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