IV
IDLENESS
O ye! who have your eyeballs vex’d and tir’d,
Feast them upon the wideness of the sea.
Keats.
Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
Stevenson.
It is an unfortunate fact that very few people are able to be idle successfully. I think it is not so much because we misuse idleness as because we misinterpret it that the long days become increasingly demoralizing. I would ask no one to accept a forced idleness without objection or regret. Such an acceptance would imply a lack of spirit, to say the least. But idleness and rest are not incompatible; neither are idleness and service, nor idleness and contentment. If we can look upon rest as a preparation for service, if we can make it serve us in the opportunity it gives for quiet growth and legitimate enjoyment, then it is fully justified and it may offer advantages and opportunity of the best.
The chief trouble with idleness is that it so often means introspection, worry, and impatience, especially to those conscientious souls who would fain be about their business.
I have for a long time been accustomed to combat the worry and fret of necessary idleness—not by forbidding it, not by advising struggle and fight against it, but by insisting that the best way to get rid of it is to leave it alone, to accept it. When we do this there may come a kind of fallow time in which the mind enriches and refreshes itself beyond our conception.
I would rather my patient who must rest for a long time would give up all thought of method, would give up all idea of making his mind follow any particular line of thought or absence of thought. I know that the mind which has been under conscious control a good deal of the time is apt to rebel at this freedom and to indulge in all kinds of alarming extravagances. I am sure, however, that the best way to meet these demands for conscious control is to be careless of them, to be willing to experience these extravagances and inconsistencies without fear, in the belief that finally will come a quiet and peace which will be all that we can ask. The peace of mind that is unguided, in the conscious and literal sense, is a thing which too few of us know.
Mr. Arnold Bennett, in his little book, “How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day,” teaches that we should leave no time unused in our lives; that we should accomplish a great deal more and be infinitely more effective and progressive if we devoted our minds to the definite working-out of necessary problems whenever those times occur in which we are apt to be desultory. I wish here to make a plea for desultoriness and for an idleness which goes even beyond the idleness of the man who reads the newspaper and forgets what he has read. It seems to me better, whether we are sick or well, to allow long periods in our lives when we think only casually. To the good old adage, “Work while you work and play while you play,” we might well add, “Rest while you rest,” lest in the end you should be unable successfully either to work or play.
A man is not necessarily condemned to tortures of mind because he must rest for a week or a month or a year. I know that there must be anxious times, especially when idleness means dependence, and when it brings hardship to those who need our help. But the invalid must not try constantly to puzzle the matter out. If we do not make ourselves sick with worry, we shall be able sometime to approach active life with sufficient frankness and force. It is the constant effort of the poor, tired mind to solve its problems that not only fails of its object, but plunges the invalid deeper into discouragement and misunderstanding. How cruel this is, and how unfortunate that it should come more commonly to those who try the hardest to overcome their handicaps, to throw off the yoke of idleness and to be well.
When you have tried your best to get back to your work and have failed, when you have done this not once but many times, it is inevitable that misunderstanding should creep in, inevitable that you should question very deeply and doubt not infrequently. Yet the chances are that one of the reasons for your failure is that you have tried too hard, that you have not known how to rest. When you have learned how to rest, when you have learned to put off thinking and planning until the mind becomes fresh and clear, when you are in a fair way to know the joy of idleness and the peace of rest, you are a great deal more likely to get back to efficiency and to find your way along the great paths of activity into the world of life.
It is not so much the idleness, then, as the attempt to overcome its irksomeness, that makes this condition painful. The invalid in bed is in a trap, to be tormented by his thoughts unless he knows the meaning of successful idleness. This knowledge may come to him by such strategy as I have suggested—by giving up the struggle against worry and fret; but peace will come surely, steadily, “with healing in its wings,” when the mind is changed altogether, when life becomes free because of a growth and development that finds significance even in idleness, that sees the world with wise and patient eyes.
In a way it does not matter, your physical condition or mine, if our “eyes have seen the glory” that deifies life and makes even its waste places beautiful. What is that view from your window as you lie in your bed? A bit of the sea, if you are fortunate, a corner of garden, surely, the top of an elm tree against the blue. What is it but the revelations of a God in the world? There is enough that is sad and unhappy, but over all are these simple, ineffable things. If the garden is an expression of God in the world, then the world and life are no longer meaningless. Even idleness becomes in some degree bearable because it is a part of a significant world.
Unfortunately, the idleness of disability often means pain, the wear and tear of physical or nervous suffering. That is another matter. We cannot meet it fully with any philosophy. My patients very often beg to know the best way to bear pain, how they may overcome the attacks of “nerves” that are harder to bear than pain. To such a question I can only say that the time to bear pain is before and after. Live in such a way in the times of comparative comfort that the attacks are less likely to appear and easier to bear when they do come. After the pain or the “nervous” attack is over, that is the time to prevent the worst features of another. Forget the distress; live simply and happily in spite of the memory, and you will have done all that the patient himself can do to ward off or to make tolerable the next occasion of suffering. Pain itself—pure physical pain—is a matter for the physician’s judgment. It is his business to seek out the causes and apply the remedy.
V
RULES OF THE GAME
It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be.
Ben Jonson.
It is a good thing to have a sound body, better to have a sane mind, but neither is to be compared to that aggregate of virile and decent qualities which we call character.
Theodore Roosevelt.
The only effective remedy against inexorable necessity is to yield to it.
Petrarch.
When I go about among my patients, most of them, as it happens, “nervously” sick, I sometimes stop to consider why it is they are ill. I know that some are so because of physical weakness over which they have no control, that some are suffering from the effects of carelessness, some from wilfulness, and more from simple ignorance of the rules of the game. There are so many rules that no one will ever know them all, but it seems that we live in a world of laws, and that if we transgress those laws by ever so little, we must suffer equally, whether our transgression is a mistake or not, and whether we happen to be saints or sinners. There are laws also which have to do with the recovery of poise and balance when these have been lost. These laws are less well observed and understood than those which determine our downfall.
The more gross illnesses, from accident, contagion, and malignancy, we need not consider here, but only those intangible injuries that disable people who are relatively sound in the physical sense. It is true that nervous troubles may cause physical complications and that physical disease very often coexists with nervous illness, but it is better for us now to make an artificial separation. Just what happens in the human economy when a “nervous breakdown” comes, nobody seems to know, but mind and body coöperate to make the patient miserable and helpless. It may be nature’s way of holding us up and preventing further injury. The hold-up is severe, usually, and becomes in itself a thing to be managed.
The rules we have wittingly or unwittingly broken are often unknown to us, but they exist in the All-Wise Providence, and we may guess by our own suffering how far we have overstepped them. If a man runs into a door in the dark, we know all about that,—the case is simple,—but if he runs overtime at his office and hastens to be rich with the result of a nervous dyspepsia—that is a mystery. Here is a girl who “came out” last year. She was apparently strong and her mother was ambitious for her social progress. That meant four nights a week for several months at dances and dinners, getting home at 3 a.m. or later. It was gay and delightful while it lasted, but it could not last, and the girl went to pieces suddenly; her back gave out because it was not strong enough to stand the dancing and the long-continued physical strain. The nerves gave out because she did not give her faculties time to rest, and perhaps because of a love affair that supervened. The result was a year of invalidism, and then, because the rules of recovery were not understood, several years more of convalescence. Such common rules should be well enough understood, but they are broken everywhere by the wisest people.
The common case of the broken-down school teacher is more unfortunate. This tragedy and others like it are more often, I believe, due to unwise choice of profession in the first place. The women’s colleges are turning out hundreds of young women every year who naturally consider teaching as the field most appropriate and available. Probably only a very small proportion of these girls are strong enough physically or nervously to meet the growing demands of the schools. They may do well for a time, some of them unusually well, for it is the sensitive, high-strung organism that is appreciative and effective. After a while the worry and fret of the requirements and the constant nag of the schoolroom have their effect upon those who are foredoomed to failure in that particular field. The plight of such young women is particularly hard, for they are usually dependent upon their work.
It is, after all, not so much the things we do as the way we do them, and what we think about them, that accomplishes nervous harm. Strangely enough, the sense of effort and the feeling of our own inadequacy damage the nervous system quite as much as the actual physical effort. The attempt to catch up with life and with affairs that go on too fast for us is a frequent and harmful deflection from the rules of the game. Few of us avoid it. Life comes at us and goes by very fast. Tasks multiply and we are inadequate, responsibilities increase before we are ready. They bring fatigue and confusion. We cannot shirk and be true. Having done all you reasonably can, stop, whatever may be the consequences. That is a rule I would enforce if I could. To do more is to drag and fail, so defeating the end of your efforts. If it turns out that you are not fit for the job you have undertaken, give it up and find another, or modify that one until it comes within your capacity. It takes courage to do this—more courage sometimes than is needed to make us stick to the thing we are doing. Rarely, however, will it be necessary for us to give up if we will undertake and consider for the day only such part of our task as we are able to perform. The trouble is that we look at our work or our responsibility all in one piece, and it crushes us. If we cannot arrange our lives so that we may meet their obligations a little at a time, then we must admit failure and try again, on what may seem a lower plane. That is what I consider the brave thing to do. I would honor the factory superintendent, who, finding himself unequal to his position, should choose to work at the bench where he could succeed perfectly.
The habit of uncertainty in thought and action, bred, as it sometimes is, from a lack of faith in man and in God, is, nevertheless, a thing to be dealt with sometimes by itself. Not infrequently it is a petty habit that can be corrected by the exercise of a little will power. I believe it is better to decide wrong a great many times—doing it quickly—than to come to a right decision after weakly vacillating. As a matter of fact, we may trust our decisions to be fair and true if our life’s ideals are beautiful and true.
We may improve our indecisions a great deal by mastering their unhappy details, but we shall not finally overcome them until life rings true and until all our acts and thoughts become the solid and inevitable expression of a healthy growing regard for the best in life, a call to right living that is no mean dictum of policy, but which is renewed every morning as the sun comes out of the sea. However inconsequential the habit of indecision may seem, it is really one of the most disabling of bad habits. Its continuance contributes largely to the sum of nervous exhaustion. Whatever its origin, whether it stands in the relation of cause or effect, it is an indulgence that insidiously takes the snap and sparkle out of life and leaves us for the time being colorless and weak.
Next to uncertainty, an uninspired certainty is wrecking to the best of human prospects. The man whose one idea is of making himself and his family materially comfortable, or even rich, may not be coming to nervous prostration, but he is courting a moral prostration that will deny him all the real riches of life and that will in the end reward him with a troubled mind, a great, unsatisfied longing, unless, to be sure, he is too smug and satisfied to long for anything.
The larger life leads us inevitably away from ourselves, away from the super-requirements of our families. It demands of them and of ourselves an unselfishness that is born of a love that finds its expression in the service of God. And what is the service of God if it is not such an entering into the divine purposes and spirit that we become with God re-creators in the world—working factors in the higher evolution of humanity? While we live we shall get and save, we shall use and spend, we shall serve the needs of those dependent upon us, but we shall not line the family nest so softly that our children become powerless. We shall not confine our charities to the specified channels, where our names will be praised and our credit increased. We shall give and serve in secret places with our hearts in our deeds. Then we may possess the untroubled mind, a treasure too rich to be computed. We shall not have it for the seeking; it may exist in the midst of what men may call privations and sorrows; but it will exist in a very large sense and it will be ours. The so-called hard-headed business man who never allows himself to be taken advantage of, whose dealings are always strict and uncompromising, is very apt to be a particularly miserable invalid when he is ill. I cannot argue in favor of business laxity,—I know the imperative need of exactness and finality,—but I do believe that if we are to possess the untroubled mind we must make our lives larger than the field of dollars and cents. The charity that develops in us will make us truly generous and free from the reaction of hardness.