【正文】 happiness depends on his physiology more than he likes to think. This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it. Unhappy businessmen, I am would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.Six Famous Words“To be or not to be.” Outside the Bible, these six words are the most famous in all the literature of the world. They were spoken by Hamlet when he was thinking aloud, and they are the most famous words in Shakespearebecause Hamlet was speaking not only for himself but also for every thinking man and woman.To be or not to be, to live or not to live, to live richly and abundantly and eagerly, or to live dully and meanly and scarcely. A philosopher once wanted to know whether he was alive or not, which is a good question for everyone to put to himself occasionally. He answered it by saying: “I think, therefore I am.”But the best definition of existence I ever saw was one written by another philosopher who said: “To be is to be in relations.” If this is true, then the more relations a living thing has, the more it is alive.To live abundantly means simply to increase the range and intensity of our relations. Unfortunately we are so constituted that we get to love our routine. But apart from our regular occupation how much are we alive? If you are interested only in your regular occupation, you are alive only to that extent. So far as other things are concerned—poetry and prose, music, pictures, sports, unselfish friendships, politics, international affairs—you are dead. Contrariwise, it is true that every time you acquire a new interest—even more, a new acplishment—you increase your power of life.No one who is deeply interested in a large variety of subjects can remain unhappy, the real pessimist is the person who has lost interest. Bacon said that a man dies as often as he loses a friend. But we gain new life by contacts and new friends.What is supremely true of living objects is only less true of ideas, which are also alive. Where your thoughts are, there will your life be also. If your thoughts are confined only to your business, only to your physical welfare, only to the narrow circle of the town in which you live, then you live in a narrowcircled life. But if you are interested in what is going on in China, then you are living in China—if you’re interested in the characters of a good novel, then you are living with those highly interesting people, if you listen intently to fine music, you are away from your immediate surroundings and living in a world of passion and imagination.To be or not to be—to live intensely and richly, merely to exist, that depends on ourselves. Let widen and intensify our relations. While we live, let live!Write Your Own LifeSuppose someone gave you a pen—a sealed, solidcolored pen. You couldn’t see how much ink it had. It might run dry after the first few tentative words or last just long enough to create a masterpiece (or several) that would last forever and make a difference in the scheme of things. You don’t know before you begin. Under the rules of the game, you really never know. You have to take a chance!Actually, no rule of the game states you must do anything. Instead of picking up and using the pen, you could leave it on a shelf or in a drawer where it will dry up, unused. But if you do decide to use it, what would you do with it?How would you play the game?Would you plan and plan before you ever wrote a word? Would your plans be so extensive that you never even got to the writing? Or would you take the pen in hand, plunge right in and just do it, struggling to keep up with the twists and turns of the torrents of words that take you where they take you? Would you write cautiously and carefully, as if the pen might run dry the next moment, or would you pretend or believe (or pretend to believe) that the pen will write forever and proceed accordingly?And of what would you write: Of love? Hate? Fun? Misery? Life? Death? Nothing? Everything?Would you write to please just yourself?Or others? Or yourself by writing for others?Would your strokes be tremblingly timid or brilliantly bold? Fancy with a flourish or plain?Would you even write? Once you have the pen, no rule says you have to write.Would you sketch? Scribble? Doodle or draw?Would you stay in or on the lines, or see no lines at all, even if they were there? Or are they?There’s a lot to think about here, isn’t there? Now, suppose someone gave you a life…