LIFE'S GREATEST GIFT

Waipa Post, Volume 32, Issue 1926, 26 October 1926, Page 6

LIFE'S GREATEST GIFT

IS IT YOURS?

(Contributed.)

I once heard a man say to a laughing girl:—'"l would give anything to have your sense of humour!" He spoke iwith such earnestness til at I never forgot the incident and it has led me to my present belief that life's greatest gift is a sense of humour.

This, of course, does not mean being born a humourist—who is often a most unhappy person. I am referring /to the power not of creating the humourous, but of being able to see R wiliere it already exists, mixed up, as it is, wtitli the ordinary things of daily life. Happiness, says the philosopher, is a -matter of contentment. This state often implies cowdike placidity. A sense of humour will enable us to make the best of any situation into whicih. life may fling us, but, if we do not Hike the* situation, it will also hellp us to scramble out of it. J

There are times in life when even our courage halts, counting the cost. Yet, before we realise what is happening, a sense of humour has carried us irredistib'ly forward. Had Evangeline not possessed it, from maiden modesty she would have drifted into the arms of Mark Stamlish. Browning tells us as part of his phffosophy of life to "laugh at a fall." He knew that if we were not able to laugh we will probably only sit still counting our bruises or may even limp back again along 'the very Uttle) way we have come.

In matrimony if therd is no sense of humour, on one side at least, trouble from jangled nerves is bound to follOiW sooner or later. If the husband possesses it, he w/ill chuckle privately but forbear openly; if the woman has i't, she will see herself that mem are but grown-up children and then things are not difficult. It is noticeable that people with no sense of humour, 'though, they may be rich and otherwise enviable, are never popular, and are rarely even envlieiL There- is notlhing to compare with this gift of easing the wheels of life when they are creaking badly. It does more than any monkey gland operation will ever achieve towards giving its owner a lien on perpetual youth.

When, we speculate om our dhoice of a fairy dowry at oirth, we usually choose from among beauty, brains, money! and the rest. Yet with none of these is happindSss a certainty. But if we are born. 1 with a sense of hum-

our. we can never fail to extract some hlappiness from ilife, whatever the chances fate may nave in store for us.* With it "'the gods themselves can be defeated."