The Random Thoughts of Henry Holloway
What side of the bed did you get out of this morning? We sometimes tell our friends, when we find them in a grumpy mood, that they got out of bed on the wrong side. In her book ‘The Plague and I’, Betty Macdonald wrote, ‘I have always hated morning. It is a horrible time of day. It is too early and it brings out the worst in everybody.’ Then she went on to describe the different types of people she and her sister used to meet in the streetcar going to work.
There was the man who had obviously just smacked the children before boarding the car and went to town brooding about the bills he had to pay. There was the silent hater, always a woman, who, in spite of having got up extra early to drink hot water, lemon juice and fruit salts, was still bilious and nasty at 7.30. There was the woman who was always feeling sorry for herself. The non-sleepers, usually men, and a host of others who by their appearance and talk, or silence, revealed their mood.
Quite obviously the way to begin the day right is to start the night before. There is a very real sense in that phrase, ‘The morning after the night before.’ The secret of the happy mood in the early morning is the prayer the night before, when you relax and lay all your worries and your disappointments on God.
‘When Joe Webster died,’ Francis Gay says, ‘he hadn’t much of a funeral. There were only two coaches. There were a few wreaths. The minister did not say much about the deceased. But after old Joe was laid to rest, I walked a few yards with the woman with whom he had lodged for 20 years. Said she, ‘He was a good man. He was a kind man and he was never difficult to get on with, not even before breakfast.’ In my scrap book I have a cartoon which appeared many years ago in a popular magazine. There are three pictures. In the first one there are five people sitting in an underground railway compartment. There is a business man with his spectacles half way down his nose. He is reading the morning paper and the news looks bad. There is the retired colonel type, carrying his umbrella because he is sure it is going to rain. There is the plumber, and he has not forgotten his tools but he obviously had a row with the wife before he left the house. The fourth man is a city clerk type with a ‘couldn’t care less’ look about him. The one and only lady - well, perhaps rd better leave her alone.
In the next picture a young mother comes into the carriage and she has her baby in her arms. The business man gets down on his knees, the retired colonel makes faces, the plumber smiles and his pipe begins to draw properly, the clerk wiggles his fingers and even the woman smiles; and all because of a baby. Yes! I know. The mother was pretty too, but that isn’t the answer. In the last picture the mother and the baby leave and everybody is smiling ready to face the day.
Real happiness begins, I think, when you learn to forget yourself and think about somebody else. There was a young man once who wanted life. He seemed to have everything and still he was not happy. His trouble, according to Jesus, was that he was self-centred. You never get happiness that way.
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