| The Every Day of Life |
Chapter 22 |
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Then, in turn, has youth has its last hour. Youth is wonderful in its opportunities and possibilities. It is the time for training and storing the mind, the time for forming the habits, the time for the selection of friends, the time for choosing of a calling, the time for the shaping of character. There are things that can be gathered into life only in this period. Few of us have any adequate conception of the crippling of lives, the marring of characters, the spoiling of careers, the poverty of the results of toil along the after years, the failure of splendid hopes and possibilities, because of the miss-improvement of youth. There are thousands of men who struggle helplessly with the responsibilities and duties of places they were meant to fill, but which they cannot fill because they made no preparation for them in the days when preparation was their only duty.
There are countless women in homes, with the cares and tasks of households now upon their hands, failing in their lot, and making only unhappiness and confusion where they ought to have made happiness and beauty, because in their youth they did not learn to do the common things on which in home-making so much depends. Whether it be their fault, or the fault of others depriving them of the opportunity, when the last hour of youth is gone, with its opportunities for preparation neglected and unimproved, there is nothing that can be done to repair the harm. “Some things God gives often. The seasons return again and again, and the flowers change with the months; but youth comes twice to none.”
Thus each period of life has its own closing, its last hour, in which its work is ended, whether well done or neglected. Indeed, we may say the same of each day; its end is the closing of a definite season through which we can never pass again. We may think of each single day as a miniature life. It comes to us new; it goes from us finished. There are three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. The only way to have a well-finished year is to finish the tasks and duties of each day as it passes. A marred or a lost day anywhere along the years may lead to loss or even sore misfortune afterward.
A student missed learning but one single lesson. At the end of the year the principal problem given to the student in the examination fell in the lesson the student had missed, and he failed in it. Then a hundred times in after years did this same person stumble and make mistakes in problems and calculations, because they had lost that particular day’s lesson. Thus failure in any duty, any day, may fling its shadow to the close of life.
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