With cheerfulness, we see a rise in emotional energy, a sudden uptick in mood. It is fleeting or ephemeral, in that it comes and goes. But we can control it. We can “cheer up”, just as we can “calm down”. As the English philosopher Robert Burton put it in The Anatomy Of Melancholy (1621): “expect a little … Cheer up.” Burton’s advice to “expect a little” reminds us that cheerfulness is a modest power. But, as Emerson knew, it is a power all the same.
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A cheery mood, we might think, is a terribly self-absorbed response to serious times. But history tells us otherwise.
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