I have no doubt the man who wrote for nearly two days had a very
strong tendency to go right to bed, but he had common sense behind
it, and he knew the result would be better if he followed his common
sense rather than his inclination. And so it proved.
It seems very hard to realize that it is not the best thing to go
right to bed or to sit and do nothing when one is so tired as to
make it seem impossible to do anything else.
It would be wrong to take vigorous physical exercise after great
brain or body fatigue, but entire change of attention and gentle
exercise is just what is needed, although care should always be
taken not to keep at it too long. Any readers who make up their
minds to try this process of resting will soon prove its happy
effect.
A quotation from a recent daily paper reads, "'Rest while you work,'
says Annie Payson Call,"--and then the editor adds, "and get fired,"
and although the opportunity for the joke was probably thought too
good to lose, it was a natural misinterpretation of a very practical
truth.
I can easily imagine a woman--especially a tired out and bitter
woman--reading directions telling how to work restfully and
exclaiming with all the vehemence of her bitterness: "That is all
very well to write about. It sounds well, but let any one take hold
of my work and try to do it restfully.
"If my employer should come along and see me working in a lazy way
like that, he would very soon discharge me. No, no. I am tired out;
I must keep at it as long as I can, and when I cannot keep at it any
longer, I will die--and there is the end."
"It is nothing but drudge, drudge for your bread and butter--and
what does your bread and butter amount to when you get it?"
There are thousands of women working to-day with bodies and minds so
steeped in their fatigue that they cannot or will not take an idea
outside of their rut of work. The rut has grown so deep, and they
have sunken in so far that they cannot look over the edge.
It is true that it is easier to do good hard work in the lines to
which one has been accustomed than to do easy work which is strange.
Nerves will go on in old accustomed habits--even habits of tiresome
strain--more easily than they will be changed into new habits of
working without strain.
The mind, too, gets saturated with a sense of fatigue until the
fatigue seems normal, and to feel well rested would--at first--seem
abnormal. This being a fact, it is a logical result that an
habitually tired and strained mind will indignantly refuse the idea
that it can do more work and do it better without the strain.
There is a sharp corner to be turned to learn to work without
strain, when one has had the habit of working with it. After the
corner is turned, it requires steady, careful study to understand
the new normal habit of working restfully, and to get the new habit
established.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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