Excerpt from Splinters, Vol. 11: December, 1910

All the beautiful morals set forth in books, and still more valuable, all the good advice that is given us in Editorials, which we generally skip, or when we do read, don't more than half appreciate, stirs us to a more violent attempt, and for a time we start up our ambition to a trot, and feel that we are making vast progress along the road of character development. Then suddenly some new ambition is brought before us, we hesitate and are lost, and off we go, on a wild goose chase, after some hitherto unnoticed fad.

Speaking of fads, I wonder how many of us confuse our ambitions with our fads. I know a girl, and she is a very good friend of mine, who cherishes a fond affection for the eccentric. She likes to be different from ordinary people and adores being told she is queer. She really thinks that her greatest ambition is to avoid being commonplace. Doubtless this makes a very nice fad, but as an ambition it has its limitations.

Then, too, high ambitions may be the finest things in the world, but how many of us who successfully hitch our wagon to a star, according to the formula, ever reach the star? We may hitch it with a double knot, and rivet the rope down with all sorts of prejudices, but when we get ready to seize that star it is somewhere up in the sky, blinking derisively.

And yet I don't think lowly ambitions are quite what we need either; the sort of person who contemplates with calmness a lifetime spent sitting before the steam heater, in company with the family pussy, darning socks, is not all that one could desire as a life comrade.

So perhaps what is needed in our ambitions as well as in most things, on this most extraordinary planet, is a happy medium - that much talked of, and seldom discovered stage, in which we succeed in satisfying the hopes and aspirations that our friends have for us, and still more, though doubtless it should be less, in satisfying ourselves. Hazelle sleeper.

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