Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 145, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 July 1917 — IF YOU LIVE IN A BOWL GET OUT OF IT OR AT LEAST LOOK OVER THE RIM [ARTICLE]

IF YOU LIVE IN A BOWL GET OUT OF IT OR AT LEAST LOOK OVER THE RIM

By ADA PATTERSON.

Do you live in a bowl? .** If you do, move out; and while you are preparing to move out, look iover the rim of the present. That is what ails so many of us. We live in a bowl and never look lover its rim. We grow smaller and narrower and peskier until we are an affliction to ourselves and an added burden to an already overburdened world. Nobody need live in a bowl. He can live on a plane, and the high iplaces are always within sight, if not of his eye, of his mind. A fly struggling up the sides of a bowl, and slipping back at last to |be drowned in a flood of milk poured into it, typifies many men and j women. The fly invited his own milky fate. He could have gotten out of the (bowl. He had wings. They were given him for escape from bowls and other narrow spheres. We should blame ourselves, none other, if our lives are narrow and unproductive and disappointing. We may have been born in a mean and narrow environment. The fly may have been hatched in the bowl. But we can get out because we can think. So long as a man thinks he will grow, and so long as he grows there is hope. Every man can travel far, for his thoughts may roam the world. The newspapers, the public libraries, put a compartment in a train at his disposal and give him a round-the-world ticket. • Every woman should give some thought every day to matters outside lher home. Every man should send his thoughts traveling in some channels besides those of his work, for a few minutes a day. In time the woman will become a better housekeeper, the man a more skillful workman, for those mind excursions out of the bowl of their own affairs of 'today.