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As a grown-up, I don’t eat things that are good for me if I don’t like them. My mother was always insisting that something was good for me and I had to eat it. Now the most I do is try to avoid things that are bad for me. I’m not doing much for the carrot farmers.

Shoveling snow is my idea of hard fun so I shovel snow in the winter, but I’ve always hated cutting the grass so in the summer I pay someone to do that.

On Saturdays, I always had to stop playing with the other kids and have lunch at twelve o’clock. I still play a lot on Saturdays but I quit playing and come in for lunch when I feel like it. I don’t care what time it is.

They can write about the glories of youth but there are advantages to maturity, too. I don’t read anything I don’t want to read, I don’t go places I don’t want to go, I don’t spend a lot of time talking to people I don’t feel like talking to.

I feel no need to wear what the other fellows are wearing, listen to the music other people listen to or go to movies I don’t want to see.

Every other Sunday my father and mother would put everyone in the car and drive to Troy to see some relatives. I liked the relatives but I hated ruining Sunday to go see them. I sat on the floor and looked at books while the adults talked. I’m glad I don’t have to go to Troy anymore.

When I was drafted into the Army, I detested the discipline. When First Sergeant Hardy M. Harrell ordered me to get rid of the books I kept under my bunk at Fort Bragg, I made the mistake of telling him he didn’t like books because he couldn’t read. This turned out to be the wrong thing for a private to tell a first sergeant and I spent the next thirty days doing a great many things I didn’t like doing.

Now there are books under my bed again.

I’m happy not doing all the things I had to do in the Army.

I offer all this to young people who are wondering about life. Don’t think things keep getting worse. Youth can be a terrible time of life just because of all the things you hate to do, but have to do anyway.

Trust 141

Plain-Spoken Wisdom

Trust

Last night I was driving from Harrisburg to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a distance of about eighty miles. It was late, I was late and if anyone asked me how fast I was driving, I’d have to plead the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination. Several times I got stuck behind a slow-moving truck on a narrow road with a solid white line on my left, and I was clinching my fists with impatience.

At one point along an open highway, I came to a crossroads with a traffic light. I was alone on the road by now, but as I approached the light, it turned red and I braked to a halt. I looked left, right and behind me. Nothing. Not a car, no suggestion of headlights, but there I sat, waiting for the light to change, the only human being for at least a mile in any direction.

I started wondering why I refused to run the light. I was not afraid of being arrested, because there was obviously no cop anywhere around, and there certainly would have been no danger in going through it.

Much later that night, after I’d met with a group in Lewisburg and had climbed into bed near midnight, the question of why I’d stopped for that light came back to me. I think I stopped because it’s part of a contract we all have with each other. It’s not only the law, but it’s an agreement we have, and we trust each other to honor it: we don’t go through red lights. Like most of us, I’m more apt to be restrained from doing something bad by the social convention that disapproves of it than by any law against it.

It’s amazing that we ever trust each other to do the right thing, isn’t it? And we do, too. Trust is our first inclination. We have to make a deliberate decision to mistrust someone or to be suspicious or skeptical. Those attitudes don’t come naturally to us.

It’s a damn good thing too, because the whole structure of our society depends on mutual trust, not distrust. This whole thing; we have going for us would fall apart if we didn’t trust each other most of