With the little lady of whom I first spoke rest was a
steadily-weakening process. She was resting her body straight toward
its grave. When a body rests and rests the circulation gets more and
more sluggish until it breeds disease in the weakest organ, and then
the physicians seem inclined to give their attention to the disease,
and not to the cause of the abnormal strain which was behind the
disease. Again, as we have seen, the abnormal, rushed feeling can
exist just as painfully with too much and the wrong kind of rest as
with too much work and the wrong way of working.
We have been, as a nation, inclined toward "Americanitis" for so
long now that children and children's children have inherited a
sense of rush, and they suffer intensely from it with a perfectly
clear understanding of the fact that they have nothing whatever to
hurry about. This is quite as true of men as it is of women. In such
cases the first care should be not to fasten this sense of rush on
to anything; the second care should be to go to work to cure it, to
relax out of that contraction--just as you would work to cure
twitching St. Vitus's dance, or any other nervous habit.
Many women will get up and dress in the morning as if they had to
catch a train, and they will come in to breakfast as if it were a
steamer for the other side of the world that they had to get, and no
other steamer went for six months. They do not know that they are in
a rush and a hurry, and they do not find it out until the strain has
been on them for so long that they get nervously ill from it--and
then they find themselves suffering from "that rushed feeling."
Watch some women in an argument pushing, actually rushing, to prove
themselves right; they will hardly let their opponent have an
opportunity to speak, much less will they stop to consider what he
says and see if by chance he may not be right and they wrong.
The rushing habit is not by any means in the fact of doing many
things. It asserts itself in our brains in talking, in writing, in
thinking. How many of us, I wonder, have what might be called a
quiet working brain? Most of us do not even know the standard of a
brain that thinks and talks and lives quietly: a brain that never
pushes and never rushes, or, if by any chance it is led into pushing
or rushing, is so wholesomely sensitive that it drops the push or
the rush as a bare hand would drop a red-hot coal.
None of us can appreciate the weakening power of this strained habit
of rush until we have, by the use of our own wills, directed our
minds toward finding a normal habit of quiet, and yet I do not in
the least exaggerate when I say that its weakening effect on the
brain and nerves is frightful.
And again I repeat, the rushed feeling has nothing whatever to do
with the work before us. A woman can feel quite as rushed when she
has nothing to do as when she is extremely busy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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