Man is the type of creature who has to take something seriously. This is for the good, as no one would respect a man who was nonchalant about his father’s honor or his grandmother’s pie. But it is not enough to be a serious person. True virtue requires that you take the heavy things as heavy and the light things as light. You must be serious about certain things and entirely unserious about others. A chief obstacle to accurate scales is self-seriousness. The self-serious man inevitably loses his equilibrium for he is too heavy to carry the weight of glory. He weighs himself in the scales and finds everything else wanting.

Such a man has grown too big for the world. He is the kind of man always running around to save his life, only to lose it. The Christian’s secret is that he takes himself lightly. What is your life? A vapor. Steam vanishing over your coffee (James 4:14). If you learn this secret, you will find plenty to be serious about outside of your own head. As Chesterton said, “You would begin to be interested in [others], because they are not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.”