"SETTLING DOWN”

Manawatu Times, Volume LIII, Issue 6536, 18 February 1928, Page 14

"SETTLING DOWN”

Some of us seem to bo born with the instinct for settling down and making a home, and others with the roving impulse, the wish, as we say nowadays, ic to live in a suit-case.” As life goes oh you may observe the unsatisfied among both types. The queer thing is that they are unsatisfied both when life has and when it has not given them what they asked of it. , Up to a point this is good, for unsatisfaction is a sign of life and of the capacity for more experience. But with all our wish' for different,” all our sense of things not explored, we need, particularly as we grow older, some measure of satisfaction, some degree of rest for the heart and mipd. • Th'e joys of settling down and of roaming are both exaggerated. The spinster woman, boiling an egg in her bed-sitting room, envies the firmlyestablished married woman who sits down to breakfast in a well-furnished dining-room with little faces round the table. But the spinster forgets that there are husbands who put'their watches before them on the table if breakfast is a minute late. The wife who remarks that “married people get so dull,” forgets that the unmarried state, if it is more adventurous, may also be, for a woman, more bleak. Where arc the perfect conditions to bo found? Only in our dreams, perhaps. But we cannot live on dreams. Our hearts must be fed on something that is real. We can best “settle down” in the conviction that among all changes and chances there remains a constant element of goodness and fellowship in human nature; we can best find “freedom,” not in wandering about the world or in changing our boarding-houses, but in freeing ourselves from petty aims and inferior motives.