Nerves and Common Sense by Annie Payson Call (ebook voice reader TXT) 📖

PLAIN common sense! When we come to sift everything down which will enable us to live wholesome, steady, everyday, interesting lives, plain common sense seems to be the first and the simplest need. In the working out of any problem, whether it be in science or in art or in plain everyday living, we are told to go from the circumference to the center, from the known to the unknown, from simplest facts to those which would otherwise seem complex. And whether the life we are living is quiet and commonplace, or whether it is full of change and adventure, to be of the greatest and most permanent use, a life must have as its habitual background plain everyday common sense.

When we stop and think a while, the lack of this important quality is quite glaring, and every one who has his attention called to it and recognizes that lack enough to be interested to supply it in his own life, is doing more good toward bringing plain common sense into the world at large than we can well appreciate. For instance, it is only a fact of plain common sense that we should keep rested, and yet how many of us do? How many readers of this article will smile or sneer, or be irritated when they read the above, and say, “It is all very well to talk of keeping rested. How is it possible with all I have to do? or with all the care I have? or with all I have to worry me?”

Now that is just the point—the answer to that question, “How is it possible?” So very few of us know how to do it, and if “how to keep rested though busy” were regularly taught in all schools in this country, so far from making the children self-conscious and over-careful of themselves, it would lay up in their brains ideas of plain common sense which would be stocked safely there for use when, as their lives grew more maturely busy, they would find the right habits formed, enabling them to keep busy and at the same time to keep quiet and rested. What a wonderful difference it would eventually make in the wholesomeness of the manners and customs of this entire nation. And that difference would come from giving the children now a half hour’s instruction in the plain common sense of keeping well rested, and in seeing that such instruction was entirely and only practical.

It has often seemed to me that the tendency of education in the present day is more toward giving information than it is in preparing the mind to receive and use interesting and useful information of all kinds: that is, in helping the mind to attract what it needs; to absorb what it attracts, and digest what it absorbs as thoroughly as any good healthy stomach ever digested the food it needed to supply the body with strength. The root of such cultivation, it seems to me, is in teaching the practical use and application of all that is studied. To be sure, there is much more of that than there was fifty years ago, but you have only to put to the test the minds of young graduates to see how much more of such work is needed, and how much more intelligent the training of the young mind may be, even now.

Take, for instance, the subject of ethics. How many boys and girls go home and are more useful in their families, more thoughtful and considerate for all about them, for their study of ethics in school? And yet the study of ethics has no other use than this. If the mind absorbed and digested the true principles of ethics, so that the heart felt moved to use them, it might—it probably would—make a great change in the lives of the boys and girls who studied it—a change that would surprise and delight their parents and friends.

If the science of keeping rested were given in schools in the way that, in most cases, the science of ethics seems to be given now, the idea of rest would lie in an indigestible lump on the minds of the students, and instead of being absorbed, digested and carried out in their daily lives, would be evaporated little by little into the air, or vomited off the mind in various jokes about it, and other expressions that would prove the children knew nothing of what they were being taught.

But again, I am glad to repeat—if instruction, practical instruction, were given every day in the schools on how to form the habit of keeping rested, it would have a wonderful effect upon the whole country, not to mention where in many individual cases it would actually prevent the breaking out of hereditary disease.

Nature always tends toward health; so strongly, so habitually does nature tend toward health that it seems at times as if the working of natural laws pushed some people into health in spite of chronic antagonism they seem to have against health—one might even say in spite of the wilful refusal of health.

When one’s body is kept rested, nature is constantly throwing off germs of disease, constantly working, and working most actively, to protect the body from anything that would interfere with its perfect health. When one’s body is not rested, nature works just as hard, but the tired body—through its various forms of tension that impede the circulation, prevent the healthy absorption of food and oxygen, and clog the way so that impurities cannot be carried off—interferes with nature’s work and thus makes it impossible for her to keep the machine well oiled. When we are tired, the very fact of being tired makes us more tired, unless we rest properly.

A great deal—it seems to me more than one-half—of the fatigue in the world comes from the need of an intelligent understanding of how to keep rested. The more that lack of intelligence is allowed to grow, the worse it is going to be for the health of the nation. We have less of that plain common sense than our grandfathers and grandmothers. They had less than their fathers and mothers. We need more than our ancestors, because life is more complicated now, than it was then. We can get more if we will, because there is more real understanding of the science of hygiene than our fathers and mothers had before us. Our need now is to use practically the information which a few individuals are able to give us, and especially to teach such practical use to our children.

Let us find out how we would actually go to work to keep rested, and take the information of plain common sense and use it.

To keep rested we must not overwork our body inside or outside. We must keep it in an equilibrium of action and rest.

We overwork our body inside when we eat the wrong food and when we eat too much or not enough of the right food, for then the stomach has more than its share of work to do, and as the effort to do it well robs the brain and the whole nervous system, so, of course, the rest of the body has not its rightful supply of energy and the natural result is great fatigue.

We overwork our body inside when we do not give it its due amount of fresh air. The blood needs the oxygen to supply itself and the nerves and muscles with power to do their work. When the oxygen is not supplied to the blood, the machinery of the body has to work with so much less power than really belongs to it, that there is great strain in the effort to do its work properly, and the effect is, of course, fatigue.

In either of the above cases, both with an overworked stomach and an overworked heart and lungs, the complaint is very apt to be, “Why am I so tired when I have done nothing to get tired?” The answer is, “No, you have done nothing outside with your muscles, but the heart and lungs and the stomach are delicate and exquisite instruments. You have overworked them all, and such overwork is the more fatiguing in proportion to what is done than any other form, except overwork of the brain.” And the overtired stomach and heart and lungs tire the brain, of course.

Of the work that is given to the brain itself to overtire it we must speak later. So much now for that which prevents the body from keeping rested inside, in the finer working of its machinery.

It is easy to find out what and how to eat. A very little careful thought will show us that. It is only the plain common sense of eating we need. It is easy to see that we must not eat on a tired stomach, and if we have to do so, we must eat much less than we ordinarily would, and eat it more slowly. So much good advice is already given about what and how to eat, I need say nothing here, and even without that advice, which in itself is so truly valuable, most of us could have plain common sense about our own food if we would use our minds intelligently about it, and eat only what we know to be nourishing to us. That can be done without fussing. Fussing about food contracts the stomach, and prevents free digestion almost as much as eating indigestible food.

Then again, if we deny ourselves that which we want and know is bad for us, and eat only that which we know to be nourishing, it increases the delicacy of our relish. We do not lose relish by refusing to eat too much candy. We gain it. Human pigs lose their most delicate relish entirely, and they lose much—very much more—than that.

Unfortunately with most people, there is not the relish for fresh air that there is for food. Very few people want fresh air selfishly; the selfish tendency of most people is to cut it off for fear of taking cold. And yet the difference felt in health, in keeping rested, in ease of mind, is as great between no fresh air and plenty of fresh air as it is between the wrong kind of food and enough (and not too much) of the right kind of food.

Why does not the comfort of the body appeal to us as strongly through the supply of air given to the lungs as through that of food given to the stomach? The right supply of fresh air has such wonderful power to keep us rested!

Practical teaching to the children here would, among other things, give them training which would open their lungs and enable them to take in with every breath the full amount of oxygen needed toward keeping them rested. There are so many cells in the lungs of most people, made to receive oxygen, which never receive one bit of the food they are hungry for.

There is much more, of course, very much more, to say about the working of the machinery of the inside of the body and about the plain common sense needed to keep it well