'Horse Sense' in Verses Tense by Walt Mason - HTML preview

BE JOYFUL

YOU’D better be joking than kicking or croaking, you’d better be saying that life is a joy, then folks will caress you and praise you and bless you, and say you’re a peach and a broth of a boy. You’d better be cheery, not drooling and dreary, from the time you get up till you go to your couch; or people will hate you and roast and berate you—they don’t like the man with a hangover grouch. You’d better be leaving the groaning and grieving to men who have woes of the genuine kind; you know that your troubles are fragile as bubbles, they are but the growth of a colicky mind. You’d better be grinning while you have your inning, or when a real trouble is racking your soul, your friends will be growling, “He always is howling—he wouldn’t touch joy with a twenty-foot pole.” You’d better be pleasant; if sorrow is present, there’s no use in chaining it fast to your door; far better to shoo it, and hoot and pursue it, and then it may go and come back never more.