Nerves and Common Sense by Annie Payson Call (chapter books to read to 5 year olds TXT) 📕
- Author: Annie Payson Call
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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, everyday 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.
“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
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