Many intelligent people equate happiness with fun. They have some mistaken ideals about the nature of happiness. The truth is that fun and happiness have little or nothing in common. Fun is what we experience during an act. Happiness is what we experience after an act. It is a deeper,

more abiding emotion.

 

Going to an amusement park or ball game, watching a movie or television, are fun activities that help us relax, temporarily forget our problems and maybe even laugh. But they don't bring happiness, because their positive effects end when the fun ends.

 

The way people cling to the belief that a fun and pain-free life equates happiness actually diminishes their chances of ever attaining real happiness. If fun and pleasure are equated with happiness, then pain must be equated with unhappiness. But, in fact , the opposite is true: More times than not, things that lead to happiness involve some pain.

 

As a result, many people avoid the very endeavors that are the source of the happiness. They fear the pain inevitably brought by such things as marriage, raising children, professional achivement, religious commitment,

civic or charitable work, self-improvement.

Youth is not a time of life, it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of will, a quality of imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep spings of life.

 

Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of 60 more than a boy of 20. Nobody grows old merely by a number of

years. We grow old by diserting our ideals.

 

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

 

Weather 60 or 16, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing childlike appetite of what's next and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station: so long as it recives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and form the infinite, so long as you are young.

 

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then  you are grow old, even at 20, nut as long as your aerials are up to catch waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at 80.