Text of the meditation
Joy is always the accompaniment of a task successfully accomplished. Of all miserable people, the shirker is the most miserable. Thinking to find ease and happiness in avoiding difficult tasks that require the expenditure of labour and exertion, their mind is always uneasy and disturbed, they become burdened with an inward sense of shame, and they forfeit self-respect. "Whoever will not work according to their faculty, let them perish according to their necessity," says Carlyle; and it is a moral law that the person who avoids duty, and does not work to the full extent of their capacity, does actually perish, first in their character, and last in their body and circumstances.
Life and action are synonymous, and the moment a person tries to escape exertion, physical or mental, they have begun to decay. An undertaking completed, or a piece of work done, always brings rest and satisfaction.
James Allen (1864–1912), Book of Meditations for Every Day in the Year (1913) – public-domain text, gently modernised.
The original 1913 text is in the public domain.