Books: Nerves and Common Sense
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Annie Payson Call >> Nerves and Common Sense
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Another strong indication of allowing our weaknesses and faults to
be positive and our effort against them negative is the destructive
habit of giving excuses. If fault is found with us and there is
justice in it, it does not make the slightest difference how many
things we have done that are good, or how much better we do than
some one else does--the positive way is to say "thank you" in spirit
and in words, and to aim directly toward freeing ourselves from the
fault. How ridiculous it would seem if when we were told that we had
a smooch on our left cheek, we were to insist vehemently upon the
cleanliness of our right cheek, or our forehead, or our hands,
instead of being grateful that our attention should be called to the
smooch and taking soap and water and at once washing it off. Or how
equally absurd it would be if we went into long explanations as to
how the smooch would not have been there if it had not been for so
and so, and so and so, or so and so,--and then with all our excuses
and explanations and protestations, we let the smooch stay--and
never really wash it off.
And yet this is not an exaggeration of what most of us do when our
attention is called to defects of character. When we excuse and
explain and tell how clean the other side of our face is, we are
putting ourselves positively on the side of the smooch. So we are
putting ourselves entirely on the side of the illness or the pain or
the oppression of difficult circumstances when we give excuses or
resist or pretend not to see fault in ourselves, or when we confess
faults and are contented about them, or when we give all our
attention to what is disagreeable and no attention to the normal way
of gaining our health or our freedom.
Then all these expressions of self or of illness are to us positive,
and our efforts against them only negative. In such cases, of
course, the self possesses us as surely as the grip possesses us
when we succumb entirely to all its horrors and make no positive
effort to yield out of it. And the possession of the self is much
worse, much deeper, much more subtle. When possessed with
selfishness, we are laying up in our subconsciousness any number of
self-seeking motives which come to the surface disguised and compel
us to make impulsive and often foolish efforts to gain our own ends.
The self is every day proving to be the enemy of the man or woman
whom it possesses.
God leaves us free to obey Him or to choose our own selfish way, and
in His infinite Providence He is constantly showing us that our own
selfish way leads to death and obedience to Him leads to life. That
is, that only in obedience to Him do we find our real freedom. He is
constantly showering us with a tender generosity and kindness that
seems inconceivable, and sometimes it seems as if more often than
not we were refusing to see. Indeed we blind ourselves by making all
pains of body and faults of soul positive and our efforts against
them negative.
If we had a disagreeable habit which we wanted to conquer and asked
a friend to remind us with a pinch every time he saw the habit,
wouldn't it seem very strange if when he pinched us, according to
agreement, we jumped and turned on him, rubbing our arm with
indignation that he should have pinched? Or would it not be even
funnier if we made the pinch merely a reminder to go on with the
habit?
The Lord is pinching us in that way all the time, and we respond by
being indignant at or complaining at our fate, or reply by going
more deeply into our weaknesses of character by allowing them to be
positive and the pinches only to emphasize them to us.
One trouble is that we do not recognize that there is an agreement
between us and the Lord, or that we recognize and then forget it;
and yet there should be--there is--more than an agreement, there is
a covenant. And the Lord is steadily, unswervingly doing His part,
and we are constantly failing in ours. The Lord in His loving
kindness pinches--that is, reminds us--and we in our stupid
selfishness do not use His reminders.
As an example of making our faults positive and our effort to
conquer them negative, one very common form is found in a woman I
know, who has times of informing her friends quite seriously and
with apparent regret of her very wrong attitudes of mind. She tells
how selfish she is and she gives examples of the absolute
selfishness of her thoughts when she is appearing to do unselfish
things. She tells of her efforts to do better and confesses what she
believes to be the absolute futility of her effort. At first I was
quite taken in by these confessions, and attracted by what seemed to
be a clear understanding of herself and her own motives, but after a
little longer acquaintance with her, made the discovery, which was
at first surprising to me, that her confessions of evil came just as
much from conceit as if she had been standing at the mirror admiring
her own beauty. Selfish satisfaction is often found quite as much in
mental attitudes of grief as in sensations of joy. Finally this
woman has recognized for herself the conceit in her contemplation of
her faults, and that she has not only allowed them to be positive
while her attitude against them is negative; she has actually nursed
them and been positive herself with their positiveness. Her attitude
against them was therefore more than ordinarily negative.
The more common way of being negative while we allow our various
forms of selfishness to positively govern us is, first in bewailing
a weakness seriously, but constantly looking at it and weeping over
it, and in that way suggesting it over and over to our brains so
that we are really hypnotizing ourselves with the fault and
enforcing its expression when we think we are in the effort to
conquer it. Such is our negative attitude.
Now if we are convinced that evil in ourselves has no power unless
we give it power, that is the first step toward making our efforts
positive and so negativing the evil. If we are convinced that evil
in ourselves has not only no power but no importance unless we give
it power, that is a step still farther in advance. The next step is
to refuse to submit to it and refuse to resist it. That means a
positive yielding away from it and a positive attention to doing our
work as well as we can do it, whatever that work may be.
There is one way in which people suffer intensely through being
negative and allowing their temptations to be positive, and that is
in the question of inherited evil. "How can I ever amount to
anything with such inheritances? If you could see my father and what
he is, and know that I am his daughter, you would easily appreciate
why I have no hope for myself," said a young woman, and she was
perfectly sincere in believing that because of her inherited
temptations her life must be worthless. It took time and gentle,
intelligent reasoning to convince her that not only are no inherited
forms of selfishness ours unless by indulging we make them ours, but
that. through knowing our inheritances, we are forewarned and
forearmed, and the strength we gain from positive effort to free
ourselves fully compensates us for what we have suffered in
oppression from them. Such is the loving kindness of our Creator.
This woman of whom I am writing awoke to the true meaning of the
story of the man who asked, before he went with the Lord Jesus
Christ, first to go back and bury his father. The Lord answered,
"Let the dead bury their dead, and come thou and follow me." When we
feel that we must be bound down by our inheritances, we are surely
not letting the dead bury their dead.
And so let us study the whole question more carefully and learn the
necessity of letting all that is sickness and all that is evil be
negative to us and our efforts to conquer it be positive; in that
way the illness and the evil become less than negative,--they
gradually are removed and disappear.
Why, in the mere matter of being tired, if we refuse to let the
impression of the fatigue be positive to us, and insist upon being
positive ourselves in giving attention to the fact that now we are
going to rest, we get rested in half the time,--in much less than
half the time. Some people carry chronic fatigue with them because
of their steady attention to fatigue.
"I am tired, yes, but _I am going to get rested!"_ That is the
sensible attitude of mind.
Nature tends toward health. As we realize that and give our
attention to it positively, we come to admire and love the healthy
working of the laws of nature, and to feel the vigor of interest in
trying to obey them intelligently. Nature's laws are God's laws, and
God's laws tend toward the health of the spirit in all matters of
the spirit as surely as they tend toward health of body in all
natural things. That is a truth that as we work to obey we grow to
see and to love with deepening reverence, and then indeed we find
that God's laws are all positive, and that the workings of self are
only negative.
CHAPTER XXVIII
_Human Dust_
WHEN we face the matter squarely and give it careful thought, it
seems to appear very plainly that the one thing most flagrantly in
the way of the people of to-day living according to plain common
sense--spiritual common sense as well as materia--is the fact that
we are all living in a chronic state of excitement. It is easy to
prove this fact by seeing how soon most of us suffer from ennui when
"there is not anything going on." It seems now as if the average man
or woman whom we see would find it quite impossible to stop and do
nothing--for an hour or more. "But," some one will say, "why should
I stop and do nothing when I am as busy as I can be all day long,
and have my time very happily full?" Or some one else may say, "How
can I stop and do nothing when I am nearly crazy with work and must
feel that it is being accomplished?"
Now the answer to that is, "Certainly you should not stop and do
nothing when you are busy and happily busy;" or, "Although your
work will go better if you do not get 'crazy' about it, there is no
need of interrupting it or delaying it by stopping to do
nothing--but _you should be able to stop and do nothing,_ and to do
it quietly and contentedly at. any time when it might be required of
you."
No man, woman, or child knows the power, the very great power, for
work and play--there is with one who has in the background always
the ability to stop and do nothing.
If we observe enough, carefully enough, and quietly enough, to get
sensitive to it, we can see how every one about us is living in
excitement. I have seen women with nothing important to do come down
to breakfast in excitement, give their orders for the day as if they
were about running for a fire; and the standard of all those about
them is so low that no one notices what a human dust is stirred up
by all this flutter over nothing.
A man told me not long ago that he got tired out for the day in
walking to his office with a friend, because they both talked so
intensely. And that is not an unusual experience. This chronic state
of strain and excitement in everyday matters makes a mental
atmosphere which is akin to what the material atmosphere would be if
we were persistently kicking up a dust in the road every step we
took. Every one seems to be stirring up his own especial and
peculiar dust and adding it to every one else's especial and
peculiar dust.
We are all mentally, morally and spiritually sneezing or choking
with our own dust and the dust of other people. How is it possible
for us to get any clear, all-round view of life so long as the dust
stirring habit is on us? So far from being able to enlarge our
horizon, we can get no horizon at all, and so no perspective until
this human dust is laid. And there is just this one thing about it,
that is a delight to think of: When we know how to live so that our
own dust is laid, that very habit of life keeps us clear from the
dust of other people. Not only that, but when we are free from dust
ourselves, the dust that the other men are stirring up about us does
not interfere with our view of them. We see the men through their
dust and we see how the dust with which they are surrounding
themselves befogs them and impedes their progress. From the place of
no dust you can distinguish dust and see through it. From the place
of dust you cannot distinguish anything clearly. Therefore, if one
wishes to learn the standards of living according to plain common
sense, for body, mind, and spirit, and to apply the principles of
such standards practically to their every-day life, the first
absolute necessity is to get quiet and to stay quiet long enough to
lay the dust.
You may know the laws of right eating, of right breathing, of
exercise, and rest--but in this dust of excitement in daily life
such knowledge helps one very little. You constantly forget, and
forget, and forget. Or, if in a moment of forced acknowledgment to
the need of better living, you make up your mind that you will live
according to sensible laws of hygiene, you go along pretty well for
a few weeks, perhaps even months, and then as you feel better
physically, you get whirled off into the excitement again, and
before you know it you are in the dust with the rest of the world,
and all because you had no background for your good resolutions. You
never had found and you did not understand quiet.
Did you ever see a wise mother come into a noisy nursery where
perhaps her own children were playing excitedly with several little
companions, who had been invited in to spend a rainy afternoon? The
mother sees all the children in a great state of excitement over
their play, and two or three of them disagreeing over some foolish
little matter, with their brains in such a state that the nursery is
thick with infantile human dust. What does the wise mother do? Add
dust of her own by scolding and fretting and fuming over the noise
that the children are making? No--no indeed. She first gets all the
children's attention in any happy way she can, one or two at a time,
and then when she has their individual attention to a small degree,
she gets their united attention by inviting their interest in being
so quiet that they "can hear a pin drop." The children get keenly
interested in listening. The first time they do not hear the pin
drop because Johnnie or Mollie moved a little. Mother talks with
interest of what a very delightful thing it is to be for a little
while so quiet that we can hear a pin drop. The second time
something interferes, and the third time the children have become so
well focused on listening that the little delicate sound is heard
distinctly, and they beg mother to try and see if they cannot hear
it again. By this time the dust is laid in the nursery, and by
changing the games a little, or telling them a story first, the
mother is able to leave a nursery full of quiet, happy children.
Now if we, who would like to live happily and keep well, according
to plain common sense, can put ourselves with intelligent humility
in the place of these little children and study to be quiet, we will
be working for that background which is never failing in its
possibilities of increasing light and warmth and the expanse of
outlook.
First with regard to a quiet body. Indigestion makes us unquiet,
therefore we must eat only wholesome food, and not too much of it,
and we must eat it quietly. Poor breathing and poor blood makes us
unquiet, therefore we should learn to expand our lungs to their full
extent in the fresh air and give the blood plenty of oxygen.
Breathing also has a direct effect on the circulation and the brain,
and when we breathe quietly and rhythmically, we are quieting the
movement of our blood as well as opening the channels so that it can
flow without interruption. We are also quieting our brain and so our
whole nervous system.
Lack of exercise makes us unquiet, because exercise supplies the
blood more fully with oxygen and prevents it from flowing
sluggishly, a sluggish circulation straining the nervous system. It
is therefore important to take regular exercise.
Want of rest especially makes us unquiet; therefore we should attend
to it that we get--as far as possible--what rest we need, and take
all the rest we get in the best way. We cannot expect to fulfill
these conditions all at once, but we can aim steadily to do so, and
by getting every day a stronger focus and a steadier aim we can gain
so greatly in fulfilling the standards of a healthy mind in a
healthy body, and so much of our individual dust will be laid, that
I may fairly promise a happy astonishment at the view of life which
will open before us, and the power for use and enjoyment that will
come.
Let us see now how we would begin practically, having made up our
minds to do all in our power to lay the dust and get a quiet
background. We must begin in what may seem a very small way. It
seems to be always the small beginnings that lead to large and
solidly lasting results. Not only that, but when we begin in the
small way and the right way to reach any goal, we can find no short
cuts and no seven-league boots.
We must take every step and take it decidedly in order to really get
there. We must place one brick and then another, exactly, and place
every brick--to make a house that will stand.
But now for our first step toward laying the dust. Let us take half
an hour every day and do nothing in it. For the first ten minutes we
will probably be wretched, for the next ten minutes we may be more
wretched, but for the last five minutes we will get a sense of quiet
and at first the dust, although not laid, will cease to whirl. And
then--an interesting fact--what seems to us quiet in the beginning
of our attempt, will seem like noise and whirlwinds, after we have
gone further along. Some one may easily say that it is absurd to
take half an hour a day to do nothing in. Or that "Nature abhors a
vacuum, and how is it possible to do nothing? Our minds will be
thinking of or working on something."
In answer to this, I might say with the Irishman, "Be aisy, but if
you can't be aisy, be as aisy as you can!" Do nothing as well as you
can. When you begin thinking of anything, drop it. When you feel
restless and as if you could not keep still another minute, relax
and make yourself keep still. I should take many days of this
insistence upon doing nothing and dropping everything from my mind
before taking the next step. For to drop everything from one's mind,
for half an hour is not by any means an easy matter. Our minds are
full of interests, full of resistances. With some of us, our minds
are full of resentment. And what we have to promise ourselves to do
is for that one-half hour a day to take nothing into consideration.
If something comes up that we are worrying about, refuse to consider
it. If some resentment to a person or a circumstance comes to mind,
refuse to consider it.
I know all this is easier to say than to do, but remember, please,
that it is only for half an hour every day-only half an hour. Refuse
to consider anything for half an hour. Having learned to sit still,
or lie still, and think of nothing with a moderate degree of
success, and with most people the success can only be moderate at
best, the next step is to think quietly of taking long, gentle, easy
breaths for half an hour. A long breath and then a rest, two long
breaths and then a rest. One can quiet and soothe oneself inside
quite wonderfully with the study of long gentle breaths. But it must
be a study. We must study to begin inhaling gently, to change to the
exhalation with equal delicacy, and to keep the same gentle,
delicate pressure throughout, each time trying to make the breath a
little longer.
After we have had many days of the gentle, long breaths at intervals
for half an hour, then we can breathe rhythmically (inhale counting
five or ten, exhale counting five or ten), steadily for half an
hour, trying all the time to have the breath more quiet, gentle and
steady, drawing it in and letting it out with always decreasing
effort. It is wonderful when we discover how little effort we really
need to take a full and vigorous breath. This half hour's breathing
exercise every day will help us to the habit of breathing
rhythmically all the time, and a steady rhythmic breath is a great
physical help toward a quiet mind.
We can mingle with the deep breathing simple exercises of lifting
each arm slowly and heavily from the shoulder, and then letting it
drop a dead weight, and pausing while we feel conscious of our arms
resting without tension in the lap or on the couch.
But all this has been with relation to the body, and it is the
mental and moral dust of which I am writing. The physical work for
quiet is only helpful as it makes the body a better instrument for
the mind and for the will. A quiet body is of no use if it contains
an unquiet mind which is going to pull it out of shape or start it
up in agitation at the least provocation. In such a case, the quiet
body in its passive state is only a more responsive instrument to
the mind that wants to raise a dust. One--and the most helpful way
of quieting the mind--is through a steady effort at concentration.
One can concentrate; on doing nothing--that is, on sitting quietly
in a chair or lying quietly on the bed or the floor. Be quiet, keep
quiet, be quiet, keep quiet. That is the form of concentration, that
is the way of learning to do nothing to advantage. Then we
concentrate on the quiet breathing, to have it gentle, steady, and
without strain. In the beginning we must take care to concentrate
without strain, and without emotion, use our minds quietly, as one
might watch a bird who was very near, to see what it will do next,
and with care not to frighten it away.
These are the great secrets of true strengthening concentration. The
first is dropping everything that interferes. The second is working
to concentrate easily without emotion. They are really one and the
same. If we work to drop everything that interferes, we are so
constantly relaxing in order to concentrate that the very process
drops strain bit by bit, little by little.
An unquiet mind, however, full of worries, anxieties, resistances,
resentments, and full of all varieties of agitation, going over and
over things to try to work out problems that are not in human hands,
or complaining and fretting and puzzling because help seems to be
out of human power, such a mind which is befogged and begrimed by
the agitation of its own dust is not a cause in itself--it is an
effect. The cause is the reaching and grasping, the unreasonable
insistence on its own way of kicking, dust-raising self-will at the
back of the mind.
A quiet will, a will that can remain quiet through all emergencies,
is not a self-will. It is the self that raises the dust--the self
that wants, and strains to get its own way, and turns and twists and
writhes if it does not get its own way.
God's will is quiet. We see it in the growth of the trees and the
flowers. We see it in the movement of the planets of the Universe.
We see God's mind in the wonderful laws of natural science. Most of
all we see and feel, when we get quiet ourselves, God's love in
every thing and every one.
If we want the dust laid, we must work to get our bodies quiet. We
must drop all that interferes with quiet in our minds, and we must
give up wanting our own way. We must believe that God's way is
immeasurably beyond us and that if we work quietly to obey Him, He
will reveal to us His way in so far as we need to know it, and will
prepare us for and guide us to His uses.
The most perfect example we have of a quiet mind in a quiet body,
guided by the Divine Will, is in the character of the Lord Jesus
Christ. As we study His words and His works, we realize the power
and the delicacy of His human life, and we realize--as far as we are
capable of realizing--the absolute clearness of the atmosphere about
Him. We see and feel that atmosphere to be full of quiet--Divine
Human Love.
There is no suffering, no temptation, that any man or woman ever had
or ever will have that He did not meet in Himself and conquer.
Therefore, if we mean to begin the work in ourselves of finding the
quiet which will lay our own dust from the very first, if we have
the end in our minds of truer obedience and loving trust, we can,
even in the simple beginning of learning to do nothing quietly, find
an essence of life which eventually we will learn always to
recognize and to love, and to know that it is not ourselves, but it
is from the Heavenly Father of ourselves.
Some of us cannot get that motive to begin with; some of us will, if
we begin at all, work only for relief, or because we recognize that
there is more power without dust than with it, but no one of us is
ever safe from clouds of dust unless at the back of all our work
there is the desire to give up all self-will for the sake of obeying
and of trusting the Divine Will more and more perfectly as time goes
on. If we are content to work thoroughly and to gain slowly, not to
be pulled down by mistakes or discouragements, but to learn from
them, we are sure to be grateful for the new light and warmth and
power for use that will come to us, increasing day by day.
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