"I am tired, yes, but _I am going to get rested!"_ That is the
sensible attitude of mind.
Nature tends toward health. As we realize that and give our
attention to it positively, we come to admire and love the healthy
working of the laws of nature, and to feel the vigor of interest in
trying to obey them intelligently. Nature's laws are God's laws, and
God's laws tend toward the health of the spirit in all matters of
the spirit as surely as they tend toward health of body in all
natural things. That is a truth that as we work to obey we grow to
see and to love with deepening reverence, and then indeed we find
that God's laws are all positive, and that the workings of self are
only negative.
CHAPTER XXVIII
_Human Dust_
WHEN we face the matter squarely and give it careful thought, it
seems to appear very plainly that the one thing most flagrantly in
the way of the people of to-day living according to plain common
sense--spiritual common sense as well as material--is the fact that
we are all living in a chronic state of excitement. It is easy to
prove this fact by seeing how soon most of us suffer from ennui when
"there is not anything going on." It seems now as if the average man
or woman whom we see would find it quite impossible to stop and do
nothing--for an hour or more. "But," some one will say, "why should
I stop and do nothing when I am as busy as I can be all day long,
and have my time very happily full?" Or some one else may say, "How
can I stop and do nothing when I am nearly crazy with work and must
feel that it is being accomplished?"
Now the answer to that is, "Certainly you should not stop and do
nothing when you are busy and happily busy;" or, "Although your
work will go better if you do not get 'crazy' about it, there is no
need of interrupting it or delaying it by stopping to do
nothing--but _you should be able to stop and do nothing,_ and to do
it quietly and contentedly at any time when it might be required of
you."
No man, woman, or child knows the power, the very great power, for
work and play--there is with one who has in the background always
the ability to stop and do nothing.
If we observe enough, carefully enough, and quietly enough, to get
sensitive to it, we can see how every one about us is living in
excitement. I have seen women with nothing important to do come down
to breakfast in excitement, give their orders for the day as if they
were about running for a fire; and the standard of all those about
them is so low that no one notices what a human dust is stirred up
by all this flutter over nothing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account