Choosing Joy

"Perhaps if we recognized this more forcibly, the petty provocations, the little teasing troubles, that are so "tolerable and not to be endured" while we are laboring through them, would cease to make the present uncomfortable, would wear less detestable aspects as they came, would no longer excite, in the rebellion against them, our ill temper, malice, hatred, and all uncharitableness, and would make less final impressions upon our nature than even now they do; we might refuse to be provoked or teased by them, and remembering the evanescence of pain and vexation, and the permanency of joy, we might yet learn a lesson from the trees of the forest that heal their wounds with precious gums; from the oysters that mend their shells with pearls."

-- Harriet Prescott Spofford, Stepping Stones to Happiness (1897)