The New Burden

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

IT is a weary world for this generation. The various modern time-saving and labor-saving inventions, instead of making life easier and giving us more leisure, have only increased our power of accomplishment. We are busy more hours in the day than our grandfathers worked, and go through them on the fourth speed instead of at a foot-pace. I use the word busy because I am not sure that the whirl of activities in which much of our time is consumed is altogether entitled to be called work, although it is often more wearing than the eight or nine hours’ toil of the day laborer.

It is not usually the brick-layers and the carpenters who break down from overdoing. Most of us wear the better for steady work at any wholesome occupation. It is the hurrying from one thing to another; the fatigue and mental confusion from trying to do half a dozen things at once, while worrying over another half-dozen left undone, that are said to be filling the sanitariums. But the multifarious activities, the work, worry, and tumultuous unrest of modern life, are as nothing in their wear on human beings compared with the strenuous life we are leading with our own selves in this uncomfortable day. We have become our own greatest burden.

Prior to, let us say, the last fifteen years, by the time people had attained their first quarter of a century, they considered themselves pretty much formed as to physical and mental characteristics. If they were ambitious and energetic, they perhaps carried on some kind of exercise for their physical wellbeing, and guarded against mental deterioration as they advanced in years by occasionally taking up new studies or reviewing old ones; as a dear old lady of my acquaintance, at the age of eighty-nine, began to review her algebra to keep her mind active.

Now everything is changed. We cannot settle down comfortably in the thought of anything in the regular routine of life which we may not be called upon to alter at a moment’s notice.

Most of us have found that few of our established habits are right, and that unless we are willing to be left hopelessly behind our associates we must learn over again all that we acquired in infancy, and that has since become a matter of automatic action.

Breathing would seem to be one of the processes for which the normal human being should not have to acquire the technique after maturity. But most people have been convicted of breathing improperly, and there is nothing for it but to begin over and learn to breathe with a much greater expenditure of thought and effort than would enable one to ride a bicycle.

In the high-school days of some of us there were only two known ways of breathing. One you did with your lungs; the other with your abdomen. The latter was considered the proper thing, so that many of us were at great pains to form the habit of abdominal breathing. Now a third kind has come in, and the abdominal method is held to ruin the figure and be the cause of all manner of evils. You must now imagine a string attached to a button on your diaphragm, and at each inspiration you must jerk the cord, drawing the chest out at that point. When you have been accustomed to breathing just naturally without any thought about it, having to keep your mind on your diaphragm with every breath you draw is enough to make you in need of a rest-cure at the end of two days. No wonder that so many middle-aged women have the muscles of the mouth and jaw rigid in a tension which, rightly interpreted, means, ‘I am holding in my abdomen and raising my chest with all my strength.’

This conscious effort is noticeable in every gathering of women. When they sit they are evidently remembering the injunction to place the hips firmly against the back of the chair. In this position the back of the sitter and that of the chair of course make no connection, and the poor women, who in their youth were accustomed to lean back comfortably in their chairs, look weary and most unhappy trying to perch in the fashion of their great-grandmothers. The man could make a fortune who would design a new chair which would fit the perpendicular back of the sitter.

It is the same with standing and walking. Many people do both of these things with the self-conscious stiffness which belongs to a new accomplishment rather than with the ease which accompanies an habitual action. Trying to mind the law laid down by one of our latest authorities in physical culture, to keep the back of the neck pressed firmly against the collar, and the directions of another as to the manner in which the leg should swing from the hip, the adult learner finds himself in much the state of mind of the unhappy centipede, to whom —

As if it were not enough that the physical culturists supervise our ways, from our rising in the morning to our going to bed at night, they must even regulate our sleep. It is a little hard on middle-aged people, who have slept all their lives in the old-fashioned way of lying on the side with the head on a pillow, to change their method. But there is no help for it. If we wish to do the proper thing, we must discard the pillow and turn over on our stomachs to sleep. Then, after two or three nights of aching muscles, vain attempts to dispose of the arms, and general discomfort, the unhappy victims of progress usually find that they have lost the art of sleeping in any fashion. Truly, there were advantages in living at a time when women put on caps at thirty and new ideas were left to younger people.

But though the physical culturists are leading us a hard life, their worst ‘stunts’ are nothing compared with the nagging we are getting from the psychologists, the mental scientists, and the new-thought leaders. They have devised more ways of making us miserable than were ever dreamed of by our ancestors.

Professor William James is responsible for not a little of our present trouble. Before his time, psychology was not a branch of knowledge which any one expected to apply to ordinary living; but he has drawn from it such a clarion call to be up and doing that there is little peace for the shirker. Could there have been promulgated with malicious intent anything fraught with more discomfort to an already over-burdened generation than his injunction to do each day some unnecessary thing that you don’t like to do? Think what it involves. On a stormy night when you particularly wish to stay by your fire, you must take off your slippers, put on your shoes, and go out, simply for the discipline. If you dislike early rising, on a cold winter morning you must get up in the dark and take an early train when a later one would answer your purpose as well. Few of us have the heroism to persist in daily self-discipline of this sort, but the thought that we ought to persist is a constant reproach to us.

The mental healers of various descriptions have become more numerous than the beauty doctors, and claim an even greater share of our time. We must give ourselves treatments for our memories, our nerves; treatments to promote our general health, prosperity, and happiness. Are we low-spirited, impatient, cross with our grandmothers, timid, lacking in business ability, not fond of dish-washing, or whatever work we have to do, we must each day give ourselves mental treatments for one or all of these things. Does any one wish to write a poem, play a musical instrument, be popular with his acquaintances, double his income, or own an automobile, he must create the proper mental impression.

An old lady who disapproved of her granddaughter’s studying physiology, said she did n’t think it was nice to know so much about your insides. We are all now too much occupied with our mental insides. The little book which your friend has for a constant companion is probably neither Shakespeare nor the Bible. You will be safe in surmising it to be How to Win, Success Is for You, Betterment, Self Help for Nervous People, As a Man Thinketh, The Great Within, Right and Wrong Thinking, Why Worry, Mental Health, or something of the sort.

The subconscious self has become the bane of our modern existence. It is only within a few years that most of us have known that there is such a thing as a subconscious self, and a happy thing it would be if we had been left in ignorance of its existence. The substance of our present knowledge concerning it seems to be that it is highly important to our welfare that this inner self should receive right impressions and that it has a fatal propensity for rejecting the right and absorbing the wrong.

Some time since, a friend, following the instructions in her manual for the training of this mysterious second self, wrote on slips of paper the particular ideas she wished to instill, such as: ‘I will not be lazy ’; ‘ I will not waste time’; ‘I will not be discontented.’ Every day she read them over several times, often repeating each admonition with her eyes fixed on a small red ball which was supposed to exercise an hypnotic influence. After two or three months of diligent effort to inculcate ideas which should produce the desired result, she discovered to her utter consternation that she had been proceeding by a totally wrong method.

According to the mental scientists the subconscious self is an irrational thing which takes any suggestion presented without regard to the intention of the mind which offers it. So when my friend had day after day repeated with emphasis, ’I will not be discontented,’ she had really been impressing the idea of discontent instead of its opposite upon this undiscriminating secondary mind. Could anything well be more disheartening than to have the responsibility of training a subconsciousness powerful enough to determine one’s conduct and so stupid that one can never be sure that it understands its lessons! Oh, the happy days of our grandmothers, who never meddled with their mental insides!

The worst turn of the screw, however, comes from the generally accepted theory that ‘ sleep is the time for mental growth; the time when new resolutions become rooted and new ideas settled.’ This is especially true we are told of the impressions and impulses that come to us on the verge of sleep. Hence, it follows as a practical corollary of this theorem that we must keep a strict watch over the ideas that drift through our minds as we become comfortably drowsy. There can be no more relaxation of the mind as we lapse blissfully into unconsciousness. We must be alert to marshal the proper thoughts and ward off all the useless, incoherent notions that float through our brains.

People used to say their prayers and then go to sleep peacefully, leaving everything in the hands of the Lord. Now they must labor with might and main to gain for themselves the results for which they formerly looked to Providence. And a weary task it is. Having one night worked hard according to the instructions in The Efficient Life, putting my mind in order, giving myself ‘thoughts of joy, of success, of accomplishment,’ I was on the verge of sleep with the happy consciousness of duty done, when unluckily a bird twittered outside my window. That caused me to wonder sleepily if the grackles were going to wake me with their clatter early in the morning. In an instant I was wide-awake, realizing that by that unfortunate thought I had undone all my work and created a whole atmosphere of mistrust and apprehension which it would be most pernicious to go to sleep with. There was nothing for it, but to begin afresh and go through the whole process again.

Truly, the teachers, guides, and philosophers of this generation are leading us by no primrose paths, and some of us who find the pace a little hard long for an occasional brief vacation. But how can there be a vacation with the subconscious self for a companion?