Samuel Johnson, the great 18th Century English man of letters, is the shrewdest teacher on the human condition I know.
“It is by studying little things,” he wrote, “that we attain the great art of having as much happiness as possible.” And he went on to write: “The main of life is made up of small incidents.” The fact is that too much of any bitterness in our lives comes from impossible expectations. Johnson was himself quick to irritability and despair but he saw clearly where the truth lay. The great sin to fight is “a refusal to be pleased,” with its sour determination always to find fault, always to look on the gloomy side of things, always to seek out the worst in people, always to criticise and put down the efforts of others.
