Opposite Influences

There are two influences that pull in opposite directions upon every person: the pursuit of pleasure and the performance of duty. And in these lies the happiness or unhappiness of a whole lifetime, even an everlasting life, If a person follows his whims, his undisciplined appetites, pastimes, passions, his life will be less, and in some measure lost. If he honors commitments, commandments, and disciplines himself to do what he knows he ought to do, them he can have many things in one: pleasure, accomplishment, self-respect and the peace of a quiet conscience. In the routine of work, in professional service, in marriage, in the home, in rearing and caring for a family, there are all degrees of discipline and of facing up to facts, and sometimes, tragically, of trying to run away from facts. But peace and self-respect, character and accomplishment, come with doing duty, with facing up to facts. If we make a contract, a covenant, a commitment, sincere and lasting satisfactions follow in seeing things through. It is so with debt, marriage, loyalty to loved ones, and all the obligations of life. “On the one side,” said Samuel Smiles, “are conscience, [duty] and the knowledge of good and evil; on the other indolence, selfishness, love of pleasure, or passion. The weak and ill-disciplined may remain suspended for a time between these influences; but at length the balance inclines one way or the other,… A man can… avoid falsehood, and be truthful; he can shun sensualism, and be continent; he can turn aside from doing a cruel thing, and be benevolent, [or the opposite]… All these… come within the range of self-discipline. And it depends upon men themselves whether… they will be free, pure, and good, on the one hand; or enslaved, impure, and miserable on the other.”