From “Cheerfulness” by Garrison Keillor

Keillor, Garrison. Cheerfulness Prairie Home Productions. Kindle Edition.

Presented on Oct. 31, 2023, by Gary Wedgewood

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Sage of Concord, the Champion of Cheerfulness, wrote back in the days of slavery when the beloved country was breaking in two: Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. Nothing great is achieved without enthusiasm.

 “…my vision of cheerfulness. You get some hard knocks in life but you still dance and let your eart sing.”

 “…it’s up to me, a tourist, to pay witness to public happiness…”

Mark Twain said, “The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up,”

Glossary of Terms:

“Cheerfulness is a choice (sometimes it’s an obligation)… every morning I choose between Anxiety, Bitterness, Cheerfulness, Dread, Ennui, and Forgetfulness, and C is the correct answer… Happiness is something else, it’s more circumstantial…”

 “Joy is for angelic beings… they just praise God…”

 “Blissfulness is brief; it comes along and you hope for more and then your cat Willow goes into hospice…”

 “Jubilation is rare but I remember it from the Cyclone roller coaster…”

 “Elation, too, is momentary…”

 “Contentment is so sweet: you sit with the family around the Sunday dinner table and everyone is more or less gainfully employed, nobody is under indictment for tax fraud or in chem-dep rehab, nobody believes immunization is the work of Satan, and your grandchildren eat with a knife and fork and don’t use foul language in your presence—the needle on the normality index is right smack in the middle.”

 “Gaiety is a lovely word that used to mean “inexplicable high spirits such as singing in the rain”

 ‘Glee tends to be cruel…”

 “Triumph is surely related to glee but we don’t use the word anymore…Same with exultation – too fancy, too formal.”

 “Delight is of course delightful.”

 “…euphoria, it’s best to leave it alone.”

 “…the secret of cheerfulness is, as Buddha and Jesus both said, to give up wanting material things… I feel the same way about gender: it’s your beeswax, not mine.”

 “The beauty of getting old is that I am no longer trying to find myself; I am here, this is me, forlorn mug and all. There is history written all over me and yet there is a secret child within.”

 “…reporters are out to impress you with their hard-earned savvy, but nowhere is there a hint that people were happy, were amused by the life around them. You read the paper and you feel like leaving town.”

 “Eighty is not the end of the world but I can see it from here…I have now and then roamed around the apartment searching for my glasses while my glasses were parked on top of my head.”

 “Never marry someone who lacks a good sense of humor. She will need it especially if the marriage lasts… As for men, don’t marry a woman unless she is crazy about you.”

Mark Twain: “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

As Anne Frank wrote, “Despite everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. … I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.” If this child hiding from Nazis in an attic in 1943 could be cheerful, then by God so can I.

Nature has no interest in our twilight years, it only wanted us to beget, to raise the offspring, then set them free, and get out of their way. God created erectile dysfunction because old men can’t be trusted to raise little kids. It’s nature’s way of saying, Enough out of you.

Mary Oliver wrote, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Fear of death is not a good enough reason to go on living: you need a higher purpose than just respiration.

The pragmatist Mr. Dewey Said of Ralph whom he knew, “He ’S not transcendental, Just sentimental, Not based on science, Not one of the giants. As for ‘Self-Reliance,’ ptui.”

Emerson:  ‘How much of human life is lost in waiting. Hitch your wagon to a star. Go where there is no path and leave a trail. The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions. So let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits… Life is short, but there is always time enough for courtesy…. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense…. “Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air…. Cultivate the habit of gratitude,” says Ralph. “Give thanks continuously….When you are shown the door, take it as a window of opportunity,”

 “I got into comedy by way of loneliness. When people laugh, it’s friendship.”

 “…when I was 75 I got kicked off public radio and I became cheerful almost immediately. It was a simple shakedown scheme by a man and woman who’d worked for the show for years—“pay us a million bucks or we’ll say bad things about you”—and MPR, without bothering to interview the perps simply cashiered the old man, and it was oddly liberating to be canceled.”

 “Adopting cheerfulness as a strategy does not mean closing your eyes to evil; it means resisting our drift toward compulsive dread and despond.”

 “Marriage is the true test of cheerfulness—to make a good life with your best-informed critic who’s seen you at your worst and could cite examples but chooses not to.”

 “…life is perilous. Walk carefully and be thankful for every good day because there are no guarantees…”

Ten Suggestions:

1.      Instead of poetizing, be useful: be hospitable to strangers.

2.      When the blues lands on you…it helps to go for a walk along a rugged seacoast…Having decided to live, why not enjoy it?

3.      Don’t be drawn into a discussion of feelings, which so often turns into a fetid swamp and people get mournful and self-accusatory. There’s a lot to be said for silence…

4.      Love your enemies, miserable misfits though they be. Shame them with kindness.

5.      Accomplish something you’ve been putting off doing and shaming yourself for. Just do it.

6.      Don’t waste time. Time wastage leads to depression.

7.      Most tragedy is misunderstood comedy. God is a great humorist who is working with a sleepy and distracted audience. Lighten up.

8.      One secret of the Good Life is to identify your mistakes and try to correct them and when that fails, turn them into endearing idiosyncrasies.

9.      Music can cheer you up…

10.  …in a pinch, you can sing to yourself.

If you go to college and become accustomed to tweedy abstracted denatured discourse about optimization and monetization and branding and molecular ideology, Ralph will come at you like a wheelbarrow of bricks. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. Be an opener of doors. Whatever you do, you need courage. The world belongs to the energetic. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. But the world makes way for the man who knows where he is going. And things refuse to be mismanaged for long.

I took a stab at unbelief and then spent a couple decades in spiritual tourism and finally found a way back toward God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him and St. Paul’s note to the Corinthians, And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love and John quoting the Lord, As the Father loved me, I also have loved you; abide in my love.

Let’s be clear about cheerfulness: it’s not the be-all and over-all, the ultimate or consummate and uttermost. It’s a useful tactic to get your head on straight and go where you need to go and not wind up in the swamp. Someday you may be old and pitiful and you’ll need to depend on friends who remember you when you were more fun to be around. Someday, thanks to good genes and advancements in medicine, you may live longer than you intended to and find yourself with blurry vision, cranky joints, occasional confusion, an unpredictable digestive tract and rogue colon, and suddenly one day you’re having to ask someone nearby to help you go to the toilet.

Here I am, O Lord, and here is my prayer: Please be there. Don’t want to ask too much, miracles and such. Just whisper in the air: please be there. When I die like other folks, I don’t want to find out You’re a hoax. So, I’m not down on my knees asking for world peace or that the polar ice cap freeze and save the polar bear or even that the poor be fed or angels hover o’er my bed But I will sure be pissed If I should have been an atheist. Dear Lord: please exist.