If the work is sedentary, it is a help before starting in the
morning to drop your head forward very loosely, slowly and heavily,
and raise it very slowly, then take a long, quiet breath. Repeat
this several times until you begin to feel a sense of weight in your
head. If there is not time in the morning, do it at night and recall
the feeling while you are dressing or while you are going to work,
and then, during your work, stop occasionally just to feel your head
heavy and then go on. Very soon you become sensitive to the tension
in the back of your neck and drop it without stopping work at all.
Long, quiet breaths while you work are always helpful. If you are
working in bad air, and cannot change the air, it is better to try
to have the breaths only quiet and gentle, and take long, full
breaths whenever you are out-of-doors and before going to sleep at
night.
Of course, a strained way of working is only one cause of nervous
fatigue; there are others, and even more important ones, that need
to be understood in order that we may be freed from the bondage of
nervous strain which keeps so many of us from our best use and
happiness.
Many people are in bondage because of doing wrong, but many more
because of doing right in the wrong way. Real freedom is only found
through obedience to law, and when, because of daily strain, a man
finds himself getting overtired and irritable, the temptation is to
think it easier to go on working in the wrong way than to make the
effort to learn how to work in the right way. At first the effort
seems only to result in extra strain, but, if persisted in quietly,
it soon becomes apparent that it is leading to less and less strain,
and finally to restful work.
There are laws for rest, laws for work, and laws for play, which, if
we find and follow them, lead us to quiet, useful lines of life,
which would be impossible without them. They are the laws of our own
being, and should carry us as naturally as the instincts of the
animals carry them, and so enable us to do right in the right way,
and make us so sure of the manner in which we do our work that we
can give all our attention to the work itself; and when we have the
right habit of working, the work itself must necessarily gain,
because we can put the best of ourselves into it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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