Nerves and Common Sense | Page 9

as in their
insistence upon overwork. This little lady never rested when she went
to rest; she would lie on the bed for hours in a state of strain about
resting that was enough to tire any ordinarily healthy woman. One
friend used to tell her that she was an inebriate on resting. It is perhaps
needless to say that she was a nervous invalid, and in the process of
gaining her health she had to be set to work and kept at work. Many
and many a time she has cried and begged for rest when it was not rest
she needed at all: it was work.
She has started off to some good, healthy work crying and sobbing at
the cruelty that made her go, and has returned from the work as happy
and healthy, apparently, as a little child. Then she could go to rest and
rest to some purpose. She had been busy in wholesome action and the
normal reaction came in her rest. As she grew more naturally interested
in her work she rested less and less, and she rested better and better
because she had something to rest from and something to rest for.
Now she does only a normal amount of resting, but gets new life from
every moment of rest she takes; before, all her rest only made her want
more rest and kept her always in the strain of fatigue. And what might
seem to many a very curious result is that as the abnormal desire for
rest disappeared the rushed feeling disappeared, too.
There is no one thing that American women need more than a healthy
habit of rest, but it has got to be real rest, not strained nor self-indulgent
rest.
Another example of this effort at rest which is a sham and a strain is the
woman who insists upon taking a certain time every day in which to

rest. She insists upon doing everything quietly and with--as she
thinks--a sense of leisure, and yet she keeps the whole household in a
sense of turmoil and does not know it. She sits complacently in her
pose of prompt action, quietness and rest, and has a tornado all about
her. She is so deluded in her own idea of herself that she does not
observe the tornado, and yet she has caused it. Everybody in her
household is tired out with her demands, and she herself is ill,
chronically ill. But she thinks she is at peace, and she is annoyed that
others should be tired.
If this woman could open and let out her own interior tornado, which
she has kept frozen in there by her false attitude of restful quiet, she
would be more ill for a time, but it might open her eyes to the true state
of things and enable her to rest to some purpose and to allow her
household to rest, too.
It seems, at first thought, strange that in this country, when the right
habit of rest is so greatly needed, that the strain of rest should have
become in late years one of the greatest defects. On second thought,
however, we see that it is a perfectly rational result. We have strained
to work and strained to play and strained to live for so long that when
the need for rest gets so imperative that we feel we must rest the habit
of strain is so upon us that we strain to rest. And what does such "rest"
amount to? What strength does it bring us? What enlightenment do we
get from it?
With the little lady of whom I first spoke rest was a steadily-weakening
process. She was resting her body straight toward its grave. When a
body rests and rests the circulation gets more and more sluggish until it
breeds disease in the weakest organ, and then the physicians seem
inclined to give their attention to the disease, and not to the cause of the
abnormal strain which was behind the disease. Again, as we have seen,
the abnormal, rushed feeling can exist just as painfully with too much
and the wrong kind of rest as with too much work and the wrong way
of working.
We have been, as a nation, inclined toward "Americanitis" for so long
now that children and children's children have inherited a sense of rush,
and they suffer intensely from it with a perfectly clear understanding of
the fact that they have nothing whatever to hurry about. This is quite as
true of men as it is of women. In such cases the first care should be not

to fasten this sense of rush on to anything; the second care should be to
go to work to cure it, to relax out of that contraction--just as