How to Live on 24 Hours a Day | Page 9

actual sleep, seven? I will add two hours, and be generous.
And I will defy you to account to me on the spur of the moment for the other eight hours.

IV
THE CAUSE OF THE TROUBLES
In order to come to grips at once with the question of time-expenditure in all its actuality,
I must choose an individual case for examination. I can only deal with one case, and that
case cannot be the average case, because there is no such case as the average case, just as
there is no such man as the average man. Every man and every man's case is special.

But if I take the case of a Londoner who works in an office, whose office hours are from
ten to six, and who spends fifty minutes morning and night in travelling between his
house door and his office door, I shall have got as near to the average as facts permit.
There are men who have to work longer for a living, but there are others who do not have
to work so long.
Fortunately the financial side of existence does not interest us here; for our present
purpose the clerk at a pound a week is exactly as well off as the millionaire in Carlton
House-terrace.
Now the great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day is
a mistake of general attitude, a mistake which vitiates and weakens two-thirds of his
energies and interests. In the majority of instances he does not precisely feel a passion for
his business; at best he does not dislike it. He begins his business functions with
reluctance, as late as he can, and he ends them with joy, as early as he can. And his
engines while he is engaged in his business are seldom at their full "h.p." (I know that I
shall be accused by angry readers of traducing the city worker; but I am pretty thoroughly
acquainted with the City, and I stick to what I say.)
Yet in spite of all this he persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as "the day,"
to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a
prologue and epilogue. Such an attitude,
unconscious though it be, of course kills his interest in the odd sixteen hours, with the
result that, even if he does not waste them, he does not count them; he regards them
simply as margin.
This general attitude is utterly illogical and unhealthy, since it formally gives the central
prominence to a patch of time and a bunch of activities which the man's one idea is to
"get through" and have "done with." If a man makes two-thirds of his existence
subservient to one-third, for which admittedly he has no absolutely feverish zest, how can
he hope to live fully and completely? He cannot.
If my typical man wishes to live fully and completely he must, in his mind, arrange a day
within a day. And this inner day, a Chinese box in a larger Chinese box, must begin at 6
p.m. and end at 10 a.m. It is a day of sixteen hours; and during all these sixteen hours he
has nothing whatever to do but cultivate his body and his soul and his fellow men. During
those sixteen hours he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is not preoccupied with
monetary cares; he is just as good as a man with a private income. This must be his
attitude. And his attitude is all important. His success in life (much more important than
the amount of estate upon what his executors will have to pay estate duty) depends on it.
What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen the value of the
business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the
business eight. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the
mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a
leg. All they want is change--not rest, except in sleep.

I shall now examine the typical man's current method of employing the sixteen hours that
are entirely his, beginning with his uprising. I will merely indicate things which he does
and which I think he ought not to do, postponing my suggestions for "planting" the times
which I shall have cleared--as a settler clears spaces in a forest.
In justice to him I must say that he wastes very little time before he leaves the house in
the morning at 9.10. In too many houses he gets up at nine, breakfasts between 9.7 and
9.9 1/2,