Books: Nerves and Common Sense
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Annie Payson Call >> Nerves and Common Sense
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"Why doesn't my husband like to stay with me when he comes home? Why
can't we have nice, cozy times together?" a wife asks with sad
longing in her eyes.
And to the same friend the husband (who is, by the way, something of
a pig) says: "I should be glad to stay with Nellie often in the
evening, but she will always talk about her worries, and she worries
about the family in a way that is idiotic. She is always sure that
George will catch the measles because a boy in the next street has
them, and she is always sure that our children do not have the
advantages nor the good manners that other children have. If it is
not one thing it is another; whenever we are alone there is
something to complain of, and her last complaint was about her own
selfishness." Then he laughed at what he considered a good joke, and
in five minutes had forgotten all about her.
This wife, in a weak, selfish little way, was trying to give her
husband her confidence, and her complaint about her own selfishness
was genuine. She wanted his help to get out of it. If he had given
her just a little gracious attention and told her how impossible it
was really to discuss the children when she began the conversation
with whining complaint, she would have allowed herself to be taught
and their intercourse would have improved. On the other hand, if the
wife had realized that her husband came home from the cares of his
business tired and nervous, and if she had talked lightly and easily
on general subjects and tried to follow his interests, when his
nerves were rested and quiet she might have found him ready and able
to give her a little lift with regard to the children.
It is interesting and it is delightful to see how, as we each work
first to bear our own burdens, we not only find ourselves ready and
able to lighten the burdens of others but find others who are
helpful to us.
A woman who finds her husband "so restless and irritable" should
remember that in reality a man's nervous system is just as sensitive
as a woman's, and, with a steady and consistent effort to bear her
own burdens and to work out her own problems, should prepare herself
to lighten her husband's burdens and help to solve his problems;
that is the truest way of bringing him to the place where he will be
glad to share her burdens with her as well as his own.
But we want to remember that there is a radical difference between
indulging another's selfishness, and waiting, with patient yielding,
for him to discover his selfishness himself, and to act unselfishly
from his own free will.
CHAPTER VII
_Quiet vs. Chronic Excitement_
SOME women live in a chronic state of excitement all the time and
they do not find it out until they get ill. Even then they do not
always find it out, and then they get more ill.
It is really much the same with excitable women as with a man who
thinks he must always keep a little stimulant in himself in order to
keep about his work. When a bad habit is established in us we feel
unnatural if we give the habit up for a moment--and we feel natural
when we are in it--but it is poison all the same.
If a woman has a habit of constantly snuffing or clearing her
throat, or rocking a rocking chair, or chattering to whoever may be
near her she would feel unnatural and weird if she were suddenly
wrenched out of any of these things. And yet the poisoning process
goes on just the same.
When it seems immaterial to us that we should be natural we are in a
pretty bad way and the worst of it is we do not know it.
I once took a friend with me into the country who was one of those
women who lived on excitement in every-day life. When she dressed in
the morning she dressed in excitement. She went down to breakfast in
excitement. She went about the most humdrum everyday affairs
excited. Every event in life--little or big--was an excitement to
her--and she went to bed tired out with excitement--over nothing.
We went deep in the woods and in the mountains, full of great
powerful quiet.
When my friend first got there she was excited about her arrival,
she was excited about the house and the people in it, but in the
middle of the night she jumped up in bed with a groan of torture.
I thought she had been suddenly taken ill and started up quickly
from my end of the room to see what was the trouble.
"Oh, oh," she groaned, "the quiet! It is so quiet!" Her brain which
had been in a whirl of petty excitement felt keen pain when the
normal quiet touched it.
Fortunately this woman had common sense and I could gradually
explain the truth to her, and she acted upon it and got rested and
strong and quiet.
I knew another woman who had been wearing shoes that were too tight
for her and that pinched her toes all together. The first time she
wore shoes that gave her feet room enough the muscles of her feet
hurt her so that she could hardly walk.
Of course, having been cramped into abnormal contraction the process
of expanding to freedom would be painful.
If you had held your fist clenched tight for years, or months, or
even weeks, how it would hurt to open it so that you could have free
use of your fingers.
The same truth holds good with a fist that has been clenched, a foot
that has been pinched, or a brain that has been contracted with
excitement.
The process leading from the abnormal to the normal is always a
painful one. To stay in the abnormal means blindness, constantly
limiting power and death.
To come out into a normal atmosphere and into a normal way of living
means clearer sight, constantly increasing power, and fresh life.
This habit of excitement is not only contracting to the brain; it
has its effect over the whole body. If there is any organ that is
weaker than any other the excitement eventually shows itself. A
woman may be suffering from indigestion, or she may be running up
large doctor's bills because of either one of a dozen other organic
disturbances, with no suspicion that the cause of the whole trouble
is that the noisy, excited, strained habits of her life have robbed
her body of the vitality it needed to keep it in good running order.
As if an engineer threw his coal all over the road and having no
fuel for his engine wondered that it would not run. Stupid women we
are--most of us!
The trouble is that many of us are so deeply immersed in the habit
of excitement that we do not know it.
It is a healthy thing to test ourselves and to really try to find
ourselves out. It is not only healthy; it is deeply interesting.
If quiet of the woods, or, any other quiet place, makes us fidgety,
we may be sure that our own state is abnormal and we had better go
into the woods as often as possible until we feel ourselves to be a
part of the quiet there.
If we go into the woods and get soothed and quieted and then come
out and get fussed up and excited so that we feel painfully the
contrast between the quiet and our every-day life, then we can know
that we are living in the habit of abnormal excitement and we can
set to work to stop it.
"That is all very well," I hear my readers say, "but how are you
going to stop living in abnormal excitement when every circumstance
and every person about you is full of it and knows nothing else?"
If you really want to do it and would feel interested to make
persistent effort I can give you the recipe and I can promise any
woman that if she perseveres until she has found the way she will
never cease to be grateful.
If you start with the intention of taking the five minutes' search
for quiet every day, do not let your intention be weakened or
yourself discouraged if for some days you see no result at all.
At first it may be that whatever quiet you find will seem so strange
that it will annoy you or make you very nervous, but if you persist
and work right through, the reward will be worth the pains many
times over.
Sometimes quieting our minds helps us to quiet our bodies; sometimes
we must quiet our bodies first before we can find the way to a
really quiet mind. The attention of the mind to quiet the body, of
course, reacts back on to the mind, and from there we can pass on to
thinking quietly. Each individual must judge for herself as to the
best way of reaching the quiet. I will give several recipes and you
can take your choice.
First, to quiet the body:--
1. Lie still and see how quietly you can breathe.
2. Sit still and let your head droop very slowly forward until
finally it hangs down with its whole weight. Then lift it up very,
very slowly and feel as if you pushed it all the way up from the
lower part of your spine, or, better still, as if it grew up, so
that you feel the slow, creeping, soothing motion all the way up
your spine while your head is coming up, and do not let your head
come to an entirely erect position until your chest is as high as
you can hold it comfortably. When your head is erect take a long,
quiet breath and drop it again. You can probably drop it and raise
it twice in the five minutes. Later on it should take the whole five
minutes to drop it and raise it once and an extra two minutes for
the long breath.
When you have dropped your head as far as you can, pause for a full
minute without moving at all and feel heavy; then begin at the lower
part of your spine and very slowly start to raise it. Be careful not
to hold your breath, and watch to breathe as easily and quietly as
you can while your head is moving.
If this exercise hurts the back of your neck or any part of your
spine, don't be troubled by it, but go right ahead and you will soon
come to where it not only does not hurt, but is very restful.
When you have reached an erect position again stay there
quietly--first take long gentle breaths and let them get shorter and
shorter until they are a good natural length, then forget your
breathing altogether and sit still as if you never had moved, you
never were going to move, and you never wanted to move.
This emphasizes the good natural quiet in your brain and so makes
you more sensitive to unquiet.
Gradually you will get the habit of catching yourself in states of
unnecessary excitement; at such times you cannot go off by yourself
and go through the exercises. You cannot even stop where you are and
go through them, but you can recall the impression made on your
brain at the time you did them and in that way rule out your
excitement and gain the real power that should be in its place.
So little by little the state of excitement becomes as unpleasant as
a cloud of dust on a windy day and the quiet is as pleasant as under
the trees on top of a hill in the best kind of a June day.
The trouble is so many of us live in a cloud of dust that we do not
suspect even the existence of the June day, but if we are fortunate
enough once or twice even to get to sneezing from the dust, and so
to recognize its unpleasantness, then we want to look carefully to
see if there is not a way out of it.
It is then that we can get the beginning of the real quiet which is
the normal atmosphere of every human being.
But we must persist for a long time before we can feel established
in the quiet itself. What is worth having is worth working for--and
the more it is worth having, the harder work is required to get it.
Nerves form habits, and our nerves not only get the habit of living
in the dust, but the nerves of all about us have the same habit. So
that when at first we begin to get into clear air, we may almost
dislike it, and rush back into the dust again, because we and our
friends are accustomed to it.
All that bad habit has to be fought, and conquered, and there are
many difficulties in the way of persistence, but the reward is worth
it all, as I hope to show in later articles.
I remember once walking in a crowded street where the people were
hurrying and rushing, where every one's face was drawn and knotted,
and nobody seemed to be having a good time. Suddenly and
unexpectedly I saw a man coming toward me with a face so quiet that
it showed out like a little bit of calm in a tornado. He looked like
a common, every-day man of the world, so far as his dress and
general bearing went, and his features were not at all unusual, but
his expression was so full of quiet interest as to be the greatest
contrast to those about him. He was not thinking his own thoughts
either--he was one of the crowd and a busy, interested observer.
He might have said, "You silly geese, what are you making all this
fuss about, you can do it much better if you will go more easily."
If that was his thought it came from a very kindly sense of humor,
and he gave me a new realization of what it meant, practically, to
be in the world and not of it.
If you are in the world you can live, and observe, and take a much
better part in its workings. If you are of it, you are simply
whirled in an eddy of dust, however you may pose to yourself or to
others.
CHAPTER VIII
_The Tired Emphasis_
"I AM so tired, so tired--I go to bed tired, I get up tired, and I
am tired all the time."
How many women--how many hundred women, how many thousand women--say
that to themselves and to others constantly.
It is perfectly true; they are tired all the time; they do go to bed
tired and get up tired and stay tired all day.
If, however, they could only know how very much they increase their
fatigue by their constant mental emphasis of it, and if at the same
time they could turn their wills in the direction of decreasing the
fatigue, instead of emphasizing it, a very large percentage of the
tired feeling could be done away with altogether.
Many women would gladly make more of an effort in the direction of
rest if they knew how, and I propose in this article to give a
prescription for the cure of the tired emphasis which, if followed,
will bring happy results.
When you go to bed at night, no matter how tired you feel, instead
of thinking how tired you are, think how good it is that you can go
to bed to get rested.
It will probably seem absurd to you at first. You may say to
yourself: "How ridiculous, going to bed to get rested, when I have
only one short night to rest in, and one or two weeks in bed would
not rest me thoroughly."
The answer to that is that if you have only one night in which to
rest, you want to make the most of that night, and if you carry the
tired emphasis to bed with you you are really holding on to the
tired.
This is as practically true as if you stepped into a bog and then
sat in it and looked forlorn and said. "What a terrible thing it is
that I should be in a bog like this; just think of having to sit in
a black, muddy bog all the time," and staying there you made no
effort whatever to get out of it, even though there was dry land
right in front of you.
Again you may answer: "But in my tired bog there is no dry land in
front of me, none at all."
I say to that, there is much more dry land than you think--if you
will open your eyes--and to open your eyes you must make an effort.
No one knows, who has not tried, what a good strong effort will do
in the right direction, when we have been living and slipping back
in the wrong direction.
The results of such efforts seem at times wonderful to those who
have learned the right direction for the first time.
To get rid of the tired emphasis when we have been fixed in it, a
very strong effort is necessary at first, and gradually it gets
easier, and easier, until we have cast off the tired emphasis
entirely and have the habit of looking toward rest.
We must say to ourselves with decision in so many words, and must
think the meaning of the words and insist upon it: "I am very tired.
Yes, of course, I am very tired, but I am going to bed to get
rested."
There are a hundred little individual ways that we can talk to
ourselves, and turn ourselves toward rest, at the end of the day
when the time comes to rest.
One way to begin, which is necessary to most of us, is to stop
resisting the tired. Every complaint of fatigue, whether it is
merely in our own minds, or is made to others, is full of
resistance, and resistance to any sort of fatigue emphasizes it
proportionately.
That is why it is good to say to ourselves: "Yes, I am tired; I am
awfully tired. I am willing to be tired."
When we have used our wills to drop the nervous and muscular
contractions that the fatigue has caused, we can add with more
emphasis and more meaning, "and I am going to bed to get rested."
Some one could say just here: "That is all very well for an
ordinarily tired person, but it would never do me any good. I am too
tired even to try it."
The answer to that is, the more tired you are, the more you need to
try it, and the more interesting the experiment will be.
Also the very effort of your brain needed to cast off the tired
emphasis will be new to you, and thought in a new direction is
always restful in itself. Having learned to cast off the tired
emphasis when we go to bed at night, we can gradually learn to cast
it off before we go to meals, and at odd opportunities throughout
the day.
The more tired we are, the more we need to minimize our fatigue by
the intelligent use of our own wills.
Who cares for a game that is simple and easy? Who cares for a game
when you beat as a matter of course, and without any effort on your
part at all?
Whoever cares for games at all cares most for good, stiff ones,
where, when you have beaten, you can feel that you have really
accomplished something; and when you have not beaten, you have at
least learned points that will enable you to beat the next time, or
the next to the next time--or sometime. And everyone who really
loves a game wants to stick to it until he has conquered and is
proficient.
Why not wake up, and realize that same interest and courage in this
biggest game of all--this game of life?
We must play it!
Few of us are cowards enough to put ourselves out of it. Unless we
play it and obey the rules we do not really play at all.
Many of us do not know the rules, but it is our place to look about
and find them out.
Many more of us think that we can play the game better if we make up
rules of our own, and leave out whatever regular rules we do know,
that do not suit our convenience.
But that never works.
It only sometimes seems to work; and although plain common sense
shows us over and over that the game played according to our own
ideas amounts to nothing, it is strange to see how many work and
push to play the game in their own way instead of in the game's way.
It is strange to see how many shove blindly in this direction, and
that direction, to cut their way through a jungle, when there is the
path just by them, if they will take it.
Most of us do not know our own power because we would rather stay in
a ditch and complain.
Strength begets strength, and we can only find our greater power, by
using intelligently, and steadily, the power we have.
CHAPTER IX
_How to be Ill and get Well_
ILLNESS seems to be one of the hardest things to happen to a busy
woman. Especially hard is it when a woman must live from hand to
mouth, and so much illness means, almost literally, so much less
food.
Sometimes one is taken so suddenly and seriously ill that it is
impossible to think of whether one has food and shelter or not; one
must just be taken care of or die. It does not seem to matter which
at the time.
Then another must meet the difficulty. It is the little nagging
illnesses that make the trouble--just enough to keep a woman at home
a week or ten days or more, and deprive her of wages which she might
have been receiving, and which she very much needs.
These are the illnesses that are hard to bear.
Many a woman has suffered through an illness like this, which has
dragged out from day to day, and finally left her pale and weak, to
return to her work with much less strength than she needs for what
is before her.
After forcing herself to work day after day, her strength comes back
so slowly, that she appears to go through another illness, on her
feet, and "in the harness," before she can really call herself well
again.
There are a few clear points which, if intelligently comprehended,
could teach one how to meet an illness, and if persistently acted
upon, would not only shorten it, but would lighten the convalescence
so that when the invalid returned to her work she would feel
stronger than before she was taken ill.
When one is taken with a petty illness, if it is met in an
intelligent way, the result can be a good rest, and one feels much
better, and has a more healthy appearance, than before the attack.
This effect has been so often experienced that with some people
there is a little bit of pleasantry passed on meeting a friend, in
the remark: "Why, how do you do; how well you look--you must have
been ill!"
If we remember when we are taken ill that nature always tends
towards health, we will study carefully to fulfill nature's
conditions in order to cure the disease.
We will rest quietly, until nature in her process toward health has
reached health. In that way our illness can be the means of giving
us a good rest, and, while we may feel the loss of the energy of
which the disease has robbed us, we also feel the good effects of
the rest which we have given to organs which were only tired.
These organs which have gained rest can, in their turn, help toward
renewing the strength of the organs which had been out of order, and
thus we get up from an illness looking so well, and feeling so well,
that we do not regret the loss of time, and feel ready to work, and
to gradually make up the loss of money.
Of course, the question is, how to fulfill the conditions so that
this happy result can be attained.
In the first place, _do not fret._
"But how can I help fretting?" someone will say, "when I am losing
money every day, and do not know how many more days I may be laid
up?"
The answer to that is: "If you will think of the common sense of it,
you can easily see that the strain of fretting is interfering
radically with your getting well. For when you are using up strength
to fret, you are simply robbing yourself of the vitality which would
be used directly in the cure of your illness."
Not only that, but the strain of fretting increases the strain of
illness, and is not only preventing you from getting well, but it is
tending to keep you ill.
When we realize that fact, it seems as if it would be an easy matter
to stop fretting in order to get well.
It is as senseless to fret about an illness, no matter how much just
cause we may feel we have, as it would be to walk west when our
destination was directly east.
Stop and think of it. Is not that true? Imagine a child with a pin
pricking him, kicking, and screaming, and squirming with the pain,
so that his mother--try as carefully as she may--takes five minutes
to find the pin and get it out, when she might have done it and
relieved him in five seconds, if only the child had kept still and
let her.
So it is with us when Mother Nature is working with wise steadiness
to find the pin that is making us ill, and to get it out. We fret
and worry so that it takes her ten or twenty days to do the good
work that she might have done in three.
In order to drop the fretting, we must use our wills to think, and
feel, and act, so that the way may be opened for health to come to
us in the quickest possible time.
Every contraction of worry which appears in the muscles we must
drop, so that we lie still with a sense of resting, and waiting for
the healing power, which is surely working within us, to make us
well.
_We can do this by a deliberate use of our wills._
If we could take our choice between medicine, and the curative power
of dropping anxiety and letting ourselves get well, there would be
no hesitancy, provided we understood the alternatives.
I speak of fretting first because it is so often the strongest
interference with health.
Defective circulation is the trouble in most diseases, and we should
do all we can to open the channels so that the circulation, being
free elsewhere, can tend to open the way to greater freedom in the
part diseased. The contractions caused by fretting impede the
circulation still more, and therefore heighten the disease.
If once, by a strong use of the will, we drop the fretting and give
ourselves up entirely to letting nature cure us, then we can study,
with interest, to fulfill other necessary conditions. We can give
ourselves the right amount of fresh air, of nourishment, of bathing,
and the right sort of medicine, if any is needed.
Thus, instead of interfering with nature, we are doing all in our
power to aid her; and when nature and the invalid work in harmony,
health comes on apace.
When illness brings much pain and discomfort with it, the endeavor
to relax out of the contractions caused by the pain, are of the same
service as dropping contractions caused by the fretting.
If one can find a truly wise doctor, or nurse, in such an illness as
I refer to, get full instructions in just one visit, and then follow
those directions explicitly, only one visit will be needed,
probably, and the gain from that will pay for it many times over.
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