People often say to me: “I wish I could always keep the beautiful mood I now enjoy!” My answer is: “Crystallize it into action. Honour it by doing something. Say a kind word. Do a generous deed. Perform an arduous task. Do some hard thing, heroically, if only for the sake of discipline.
Put your mood into the work. Infuse it into your daily duties. Let it enable you to bear drudgery with sweetness, to convert pain into power. Thus shall you transform the evanescent mood into permanent character. Thus shall you add to your capital and increase your emotional capacity and thus shall you cultivate that attitude toward life which is the object of our search.
Not by any miraculous or instantaneous change of heart; not alone by happy affirmations or luminous ideals; but by honouring the thought by the deed, by crystallizing the impulse into action, by converting the transient mood into the stable assets of habit, character and dis position—and all this not in any transcendental sphere beyond the clouds, but right here in the common, everyday life of plain men and women.
Here, and no other where, shall you find the royal road; thus, and by no other path, shall you attain the love-life you seek. – J. E. WILLIAMS
