"But," some one says, "may I not feel pressed for time when I have
more to do than I can possibly put into the time before me ?"
Oh, yes, yes--you can feel normally pressed for time; and because of
this pressure you can arrange in your mind what best to leave
undone, and so relieve the pressure. If one thing seems as important
to do as another you can make up your mind that of course you can
only do what you have time for, and the remainder must go. You
cannot do what you have time to do so well if you are worrying about
what you have no time for. There need be no abnormal sense of rush
about it.
Just as Nature tends toward health, Nature tends toward rest--toward
the right kind of rest; and if we have lost the true knack of
resting we can just as surely find it as a sunflower can find the
sun. It is not something artificial that we are trying to learn--it
is something natural and alive, something that belongs to us, and
our own best instinct will come to our aid in finding it if we will
only first turn our attention toward finding our own best instinct.
We must have something to rest from, and we must have something to
rest for, if we want to find the real power of rest. Then we must
learn to let go of our nerves and our muscles, to leave everything
in our bodies open and passive so that our circulation can have its
own best way. But we must have had some activity in order to have
given our circulation a fair start before we can expect it to do its
best when we are passive.
Then, what is most important, we must learn to drop all effort of
our minds if we want to know how to rest; and that is difficult. We
can do it best by keeping our minds concentrated on something simple
and quiet and wholesome. For instance, you feel tired and rushed and
you can have half an hour in which to rest and get rid of the rush.
Suppose you lie down on the bed and imagine yourself a turbulent
lake after a storm. The storm is dying down, dying down, until by
and by there is no wind, only little dashing waves that the wind has
left. Then the waves quiet down steadily, more and more, until
finally they are only ripples on the water. Then no ripples, but the
water is as still as glass. The sun goes down. The sky glows.
Twilight comes. One star appears, and green banks and trees and sky
and stars are all reflected in the quiet mirror of the lake, and you
are the lake, and you are quiet and refreshed and rested and ready
to get up and go on with your work--to go on with it, too, better
and more quietly than when you left it.
Or, another way to quiet your mind and to let your imagination help
you to a better rest is to float on the top of a turbulent sea and
then to sink down, down, down until you get into the still water at
the bottom of the sea. We all know that, no matter how furious the
sea is on the surface, not far below the surface it is absolutely
still. It is very restful to go down there in imagination.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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