Opulence
o not go through the world
talking
poverty and asking every one you
deal with to show you special con-
sideration because you are "poor"
and "unfortunate."
If you do this with an idea of
saving a few dollars here and there, you will
always have to do it, because you are creating
poverty conditions by your constant assertions.
It is a curious fact that the people who are
always demanding consideration in money mat-
ters demand the best that is going at the same
time.
I have known a woman to make a plea for
cut prices in a boarding house because she was so
poor, yet she wanted the sunniest room and the
best location the house afforded.
It is the charity patients who make the most
complaint of a physician's skill or a nurse's
attention.
If you cannot afford to do certain things, or
buy certain objects, don't. But when you decide
you must, decide too, that you will pay the price,
and make no whining plea of poverty.
There are two extremes of people in the world,
one as distasteful as the other. One is represent-
ed by the man who boasts of the costliness of
every possession, and invites the whole world to
behold his opulence and expenditure.
His clothes, his house, his servants, his habits,
seem no different to the observer from his neigh-
bor's, yet, according to his story, they cost ten
times the amount.
The other extreme is the man who dresses
well, lives well, enjoys all the comforts and
pleasures of his associates, yet talks poverty con-
tinually, and expects the entire community to
show him consideration in consequence.
Another thing to avoid is the role of the chron-
ically injured person.
We all know him.
He has a continual grievance. He has been
cheated, abused, wronged, insulted, disappointed
and deceived. We wonder how or why he has
managed to exist, as we listen to the story of his
troubles.
No one ever treats him fairly, either in busi-
ness or social life. Everybody is ungrateful, un-
kind, selfish, and he could not be made to believe
that these experiences were of his own making.
All of us meet with occasional blows from
fate, in the form of insults, or ingratitude, or
trickery from an unexpected source.
But if we got nothing else but those disappoint-
ing experiences from life, we may rest assured
the fault lies somewhere in ourselves.
We are not sending out the right kind of
mental stuff, or we would get better returns.
You never can tell what your thoughts will do
In bringing you hate or
love,
For thoughts are things, and their airy wings
Are swift as a carrier dove.
They follow the law of the universe--
Each thing must create its
kind,
And they speed o'er the track to bring you back
Whatever went out from your
mind.
In the main, we must of necessity get from
humanity what we give to it. If we question our
ability to win friends or love, people will also
question it.
If we doubt our own judgment and discretion
in business, others will doubt it, and the shrewd
and unprincipled will take the opportunity given
by our doubts of ourselves, to spring upon us.
If in consequence we distrust every person
we meet, we create an unwholesome and un-
fortunate atmosphere about ourselves, which will
bring to us the unworthy and deceitful. Stand
firm in the universe. Believe in yourself. Be-
lieve in others.
If you make a mistake, consider it only an
incident.
If some one wrongs you, cheats, misuses or
insults you, let it pass as one of the lessons you
had to learn, but do not imagine that you are
selected by fate for only such lessons. Keep
wholesome, hopeful and sympathetic with the
world at large, whatever individuals may do.
Expect life to use you better every year, and it
will not disappoint you in the long run. For life
is what we make it.
The Heart of the New Thought by Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
Chicago : The Psychic Research Company, c1902.
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