The benefit of studying human nature: You’ll never be bored
This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on Nov. 8, 1941.
Monotony kills people, just as surely as motor cars, though not in such spectacular fashion. Monotony does not depend on circumstances altogether. Some people would be bored in the British Museum, and there are people living happily in lighthouses. “The kingdom of Heaven is within you.”
Nature has done much for us in creating a rhythm of life, where the only certain thing is change. We have night and day, shadow and sunshine, summer and winter, saving and spending, sowing and reaping, the ebb and flow of the tide, youth and age. The pages of literature are full of this rhythm and how it affects our mortal journey.
“Sweet is the sunshine after rain,
And sweet the sleep that follows pain.”
So run the words of an old hymn.
Even that unexpected source of inspiration — the blackboard in front of a service station — has been known to put in a “plug” for life’s rhythm and balance: “The poor man worries over his next meal; the rich man over his last one.”
This rhythm of life is part of life’s compensation. Certain it is we pay for what we get. We achieve success in one field by accepting failure in another. You can’t have everything. Life has a way of balancing its accounts, sometimes in plain sight, here and now.
In my childhood I knew a man who ruled his household with a rod of iron. He kept the store and post office in a little prairie village. He had the European idea of the woman’s place in a household.
His wife was one of those little fluttering women with meek brown eyes, soft as a spaniel’s, and a skin as fine as a rose leaf. Her life was spent in appeasement. By the grapevine source of information, whereby the secrets of all hearts are revealed, we knew that she never had a cent of her own to spend, and she was not allowed even to write to her own people in England.
She told someone that she played the organ at home, and taught music in the village, but had never touched a piano or organ since she was married because Mr. R was not fond of music. Often, in my young heart, I prayed that the years of her servitude would be shortened; I hoped the old tyrant would break his neck.
That was the only way I could see, but I was afraid this crabbed, sour-tempered man would live out his days. Good men die every day, but a man like this would go on and on. And so he did. But life balanced his books in another way.
The patient little woman slipped out from under her burdens, one day in the spring, when the meadowlarks were singing from the fence posts and the blue anemones were painting the banks of the creek. The neighbours wept as they passed her coffin, not for her death, but for her life and the years which the canker-worm had eaten. Said the neighbours, as they drove home from the funeral: “Now he’ll probably get some other saint of a woman who will fetch and carry for him as this little thing did.”
Just after Christmas that year he went back to Ontario and married his “first love” with a church wedding and flowers. Flowers in the dead o’ winter! And the first wife never had even a carpetsweeper!
The second wife was big, blackhaired and commanding. In a month or so, stories began to trickle through, good stories, told and heard with relish. She had hired a housekeeper and had taken command of the store. She locked up the cash at night. She would not let him go to the lodge and he had to ask her for a quarter when he went out to get a chair cut.
They were going to build a new house in the spring, and she had ordered a player piano. One story led all the rest in what editors call “reader interest.” One of the neighbours told about being in the store and talking to the new Mrs. R when Mr. R came up and asked her a question. The narrator said Mrs. R held up her hand like a London policeman, uttered the one word, “Quiet,” and finished what she was saying.
This episode of our storekeeper’s second marriage did much to restore the faith of our district. It convinced us that God does sometimes balance his books, without waiting for the Judgment Day.
Alexander Pope uttered a fundamental tenet of successful and victorious living when he said: “The proper study for mankind is man.”
That is a field which is always in bloom and always ready for the harvest; like the orange tree, which has buds, flowers and fruit perpetually. It was not by accident that orange blossoms have been chosen as the symbol of marriage. No lover of humanity will ever be bored. The great human drama is ever before us, if we have eyes to see it. Indeed we are part of it.
I have been rereading that lovely poem by Edmund Gosse in which he tells about watching three mowers in a field:
“Brown English faces by the sun burnt red,
Rich glowing colour on bare throat and head,
My heart would leap to watch them, were I dead!”
Then he sees a young girl coming down the road “with a pitcher on her head, and a clean white apron on her gown of red.” She is waiting for the youngest mower, and as they walk away together, the poet lives with them the ecstasy of love’s young dream.
Children come into the meadow and romp and frolic in the newmowed hay. Butterflies are darting over the meadow, and somewhere back in the beechwood there is “a dreamy nightingale that hardly sings.” The poet’s heart is part of all this beauty, and here is his summary:
“I do not hunger for a wellstored mind,
I only wish to live my life, and find
My heart in unison with all mankind.”
When we reach that state of mind, that promised land of brighter sunshine and deeper shadows, and find ourselves part of all the joy and all the sorrow of the world, we will never be bored. In the great play of life there are no spectators. We all have a part. We might not have much to do with the first casting, but we do write our own lines.