Burton Hillis and Others on Whistling and Humming

Burton Hillis speaks of whistling as an outlet for the joy and peace that well in the heart. Moreover, he strongly believes that one who whistles cannot be harboring any meanness or malice deep in his heart. Whoever hears an angry person whistle?

Can we say the same of a girl who hums as she goes about her daily home chores? Or a man who, as he toils in the fields sings out a lusty merry tune?

What is the effect of the whistle on others who listen to him? The whistler passes on a message of good will and friendliness, and before long he, the listener, catches the spirit of joy and mirth.



Cheerfulness is something you should cultivate. With your heart full of the joy of living you help make the world a happy place in which to live. Henry Ward Beecher said: "A man without mirth is like a wagon without springs. He is jolted disagreeably by only pebble in the road."

George Elliot speaks of the futility of life that is not spent in making it less difficult for one another.

There is a need for the cultivation of cheerfulness. Try keeping a cheerful disposition and maintaining a calm unworried state of mind amidst adverse happenings and you will find yourself happily adjusted. What is more you will radiate a bright light around.

You maintain a cheerful disposition when, as you are bent over an unpleasant task for yourself or for someone who is unjustly and several critical, you keep toiling on with a smile and a will to succeed.

Cheerfulness does not mean boisterous laughter caused by dirty indecent stories. Vulgar jokes irritate rather than brighten your sensibility. Many stories in comic strips are not the kind that develop wholesome humor.

Try cultivating humor. Humor is the quality of action, speech, or writing which excites amusement. It means the faculty of seeing what is amusing. "Ask anyone knows and has experienced the lubricating effects of even a small joke in a household, humor has an element of juice. It keeps life from drying up, and gives to it living freshness and flavor."

Cheerfulness and Optimism

“Men and boys don’t whistle the way they used to. In my days, every boy who amounted to anything was a whistler.”

“As a boy, I used to climb the town water tower and sit up there all by myself and whistle to the sky above me and to the world below me. A woman would start setting the table when she heard her man come whistling home, and she would listen for her son’s whistle if he was out after dark. I don’t say that whistling improved a man’s thinking or anything like that, but I do say you cannot be working up any mean thoughts when the words of some pretty tune are running through your head, while you whistle the air as fine and fancy as you can.”

-Burton Hillis

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Looking Ahead for Growth

Those who gaze too much upon the past, who think too much about what might have been, are running something of the same risk as the driver who keeps his eyes upon the rearview mirror and is inattentive to the road ahead.

Experience is a great teacher; it is the road we have been over. But the wrecks in the rear aren't the ones we are now trying to avoid. It's the curves ahead that count now. Whatever mistakes we have made, our only way out is ahead. This is life's inflexible formula. What has been and might have been may well serve as a warning - but what may yet be is our first concern.

- Richard Evans

Know Thyself

Your father has plans for you. He dreams of seeing you a civil engineer someday. He tells his friends of his big plans. He does not bother appraising your talents, the things you can do and like to do best. He has not taken the trouble of sizing up your weaknesses. Seeing your father set on the career he likes best for you, you, too. That he feel it is the right thing to do for you to have a better life.

Do you think this is a good start towards growth? Is it someone else who should determine what you will be in the future? What is the right thing to do?

“Know thyself,” said the philosopher Socrates of ancient times. Knowing yourself means knowing your talents, your likes and dislikes, what you can do and like to do best. It means examining the world about you, deciding what you must do to get what you want out of life, then listing down your plans to reach it.

This in essence is the next formula for growth: to know yourself, know what you want for your improvement, depending upon your capabilities.

The more aware you are of yourself, of your strength and your weakness, the more alive you become.

Is it important that you should grow? It is of utmost importance:

“All that we need to do,

Be we low or high,

Is to see that we grow

Nearer the sky”

-Lizzette Woodworth Reese

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Improve Every Shining Hour

It is your job now to improve when you are young. What should you do to improve every shining hour?

1. Learn something new, something that was not yours yesterday. Store a new idea in your mind. Gather new and constructive ideas from your elders and let your mind be a storehouse. Of course, it takes a keen mind to determine what ideas are useful and what to discard because they are trash.
2. Absorb new knowledge. Take your day's lessons as a source of new and rich information, of new experiences and new lessons in the right living.
3. Acquire new skills - skills which will give you techniques in doing constructive work, skills which will minimize, if not entirely eliminate, waste and errors.
4. Discover new sights, new sounds, new scents from your environment that will enrich your life and make living an entirely interesting experience.
5. It is when you are young that you envision what you would wish to be in the future. Reading is the best preparation for a happy life ahead.