How to take change
by
I walked with my friend, a Quaker, to the newsstand the other night, and he bought a paper, thanking the newsie politely. The newsie didn’t even acknowledge it.
A sullen fellow, isn’t he? I commented.
Oh, he’s that way every night, shrugged my friend.
Then why do you continue to be so polite to my him?’ I asked. Why not? inquired my friend. Why should I let him decide how I’m going to act?.
As I thought about this incident later, it occurred to me that the important word was act. My friends acts toward people; most of us react toward them.
He has a sense of inner balance which is lacking in most of us; he knows who he is, what he stands for, how he should behave. He refuses to return incivility for inactivity, because then he would no longer be in command of his own conduct. When we are enjoined in the bible to return good for evil, we look upon this as a moral injunction which it is. But it is also a psychological prescription for our emotional health. Nobody is unhappier than the perpetual reactor. His center of emotional gravity is not rooted within himself, where it belongs, but in the world outside him. His spiritual temperature is always being raised or lowered by the social climate around him, and he is a mere creature at the mercy of these elements.
