Looking Back.

One of the stock jokes of the world is the elderly club bore, who repeats, oblivious to the fidgetings and stifled yawns of his more polite acquaintance, anecdotes of his boyhood, youngmanhood or middle years. In all of these, be it noted, he figures as rather a fine person, the kind of person who not only has things happen to him, but makes them happen to others. “He's getting old, poor old chap!” we excuse him by saying—and continue our efforts to avoid conversation.

How much worse is it to meet the still fairly young bore whom old age, in the form of grouching, inertia, loss of ambition, has seized too soon; the man who looks back on what he did a few years ago and, with a brave attempt at self-importance, says, “Look! Such a man I was then! There were possibilities—I've never followed them up, but you see what I might have done.” Poor thing! He listens with a wistful look to the doer, the man whose life is so active that he can find time for even more interests, grasping them eagerly. The has-been thinks, “I started off on that road once” —and leaves it at that.

In all of us, of course, there is a sneaking admiration for what we were once. Perhaps the greatest pleasure of retrospection lies in glorifying our distant selves. But retrospection is good only in small doses. To the young bore we feel like saying, “Look back by all means—for a while. See what in you was admirable, and realise that you still possess those qualities. Decide to develop them, now! Look back in future only to measure your own rate of progress.”

The pleasure to be gained from being now is insuperably greater than that of having been. Take your place with the doers, the place that you know belongs to you by right of the qualities that are in you, the place for which you were shaping yourself those years ago when you admired yourself. Do that, gaining happiness in proportion to effort. Do that, and page 58 be to-day the person you were, plus what the years and your own striving have added unto you.

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