Social Work; Essays on the Meeting Ground of Doctor and Social WorkerCabot, Richard C. (Richard Clarke)
Science
Social Work; Essays on the Meeting Ground of Doctor and Social Worker
Cabot, Richard C. (Richard Clarke)
Charities, Medical; Friendly visiting; Medical social work -- United States; Social service
Just here the _individuality of fatigue_, which I have been trying to
make clear all along, becomes obvious. We are rested by making a success
of something. If we have been making what seems to us a failure of
something, it is amazing how it rests us to make a success of something.
The boat crew that wins is almost never tired at the finish; the crew
that loses is almost always dead tired. That is why it is so refreshing
to go home, to have a home to go to, and somebody to go to in that home,
because there you have a tiny success. You have built up that home; it
represents your savings, perhaps, if you are a working-man, or your
success in winning somebody's affections. That success is linked up with
joy. Recreation re-creates us because it enables us to succeed when we
have felt ourselves failures, or at any rate postponers. We are working
for some "far-off divine event to which" (we hope) "creation moves," but
moves very slowly. In recreation, in art, in beauty, in going to the
theatre, dancing, music, we get at something where we can succeed,
success by performance or by enjoyment and so be refreshed. One of the
things that is always exasperating to students of industrial fatigue is
that a girl who is nearly dead from working in a factory is sometimes
made totally fresh by dancing. After being tired out by standing, she
gets rested by dancing. It is certainly puzzling but not inconceivable
if we take into account the psychical factors, which we are so apt to
ignore because they are invisible.
One of the things we want in rest is success where we have felt
ourselves failures, achievement where we have felt we were postponing,
trying to make goods which we never see finished, of which we do only a
little piece. To balance all that, we want achievement, success, finish,
the present delivery of something that is enjoyed now, of home,
affection, or beauty.
From another point of view, _a test of rest is forgetfulness_.
Forgetfulness ought to be achieved in our recreation and our time off.
When people ask, "What form of exercise shall I take?" we have to bear
in mind that the form of exercise which is most valuable is that which
makes us forget. The easiest form of exercise, and the least valuable,
usually, is walking. Many people carry on while walking just the same
train of thought that has tired them. If so the walk is nearly useless.
For other people the act of walking is different enough from what they
do, so that it will break the continuity of thought and achieve
forgetfulness and rest. Well-to-do people who can run an automobile
usually can forget. That has been a little good that has come out of
the many evils of the automobile.
One of the good signs in modern education is that our old-fashioned
gymnasiums are being stripped bare, the apparatus "scrapped," in order
to give place to play a game. Playing a game gives us present joy, the
first thing we want in recreation; and in the second place, it makes us
forget.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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