RELEVANCY
So often what we want to do is judged by others to be irrelevant.
That takes some of the enjoyment out of living, I feel, and notice, if you will, please, that I said "living", because the day-to-day activities in which we are all engaged go to make up the totality of "life". It's all those little things woven into a particular, peculiar pattern which gives living a lasting quality and true meaning. If we don't enjoy it as we go along, much of it is a worthless accumulation of nothing, but what we had to do rather than things we anticipated and looked forward to doing.
"Take time," the old saying tells us. "to smell the roses." That's a good guideline to happiness I would say, but there are those among us who look at this simple act as being of silly and romantic - a waste of valuable time which could better be spent - well, planting more roses, for instance, without any conscious intent of enjoying what you are doing. The idea that "someone's gotta do it!" is not valid reason for taking on a task, I'd say. We should make it a point to be happy with what we are doing - even the fulfillment of those daily requirements forced upon us by circumstances - such as household chores and office routines.
If there ever was a man who, during his lifetime, was given a good look at the pattern of his life, Alfred Noble, the Swedish scientist and inventor. He opened up a newspaper one morning to read the obituary of his younger brother who had been killed in an explosion. To his amazement, he found he was reading his own obituary because the Editor had confused his biography with that of his younger brother. In his obituary notice Noble found he was acclaimed as "the merchant of death!" because he had invented dynamite.
No, it was not the New York “Times” in an earlier phase of their recent reporting irregularities.
Alfred Nobel set out to change that horrible memory because he had always been a person who took great joy and satisfaction in helping people. His experiments with explosives were done, primarily, to advance mankind's well-being. It was his "Dynamite" that made the digging of tunnels under the Alps possible, as well as score or more of other achievements. The fact that Man has misused the inventions he discovered to conduct war - which he had long hated and scorned - was not his fault.
Nobel, from that point on, made it one of the joys of his daily living to give his wealth to the advancement of mankind, not only in the Sciences and the Arts, but to world-wide Peace for all mankind. His real obituary, years later, spoke of him as the founder of the Noble Peace Prize. He was revered, too, as the man who found a way to make the use of highly volatile intro-glycerin safer for man (a material he called "Dynamite") to use in construction work as well as devising a score of more of related inventions which helped mankind in many ways. He went right on experimenting - often endangered but dedicated - because he was doing what he enjoyed doing , however irrelevant it must have seemed to many of his critics in his own day.
A.L.M. May 30, 2003 [c867wds]
