"I have neither the time nor the strength
to attend to all this." My answer is, such exercise will save time and
strength in the end.

CHAPTER XXIII

_Do not Hurry_

HOW can any one do anything well while in a constant state of rush? How
can any one see anything clearly while in a constant state of rush? How
can any one expect to keep healthy and strong while in a constant state
of rush?

But most of my readers may say, "I am not in a constant state of
rush--I only hurry now and then when I need to hurry."

The answer to that is "Prove it, prove it." Study yourself a little,
and see whether you find yourself chronically in a hurry or not.

If you will observe yourself carefully with a desire to find the hurry
tendency, and to find it thoroughly, in order to eliminate it, you will
be surprised to see how much of it there is in you.

The trouble is that all our standards are low, and to raise our
standards we must drop that which interferes with the most wholesome
way of living.

As we get rid of all the grosser forms of hurry we find in ourselves
other hurry habits that are finer and more subtle, and gradually our
standards of quiet, deliberate ways get higher; we become more
sensitive to hurry, and a hurried way of doing things grows more and
more disagreeable to us.

Watch the women coming out of a factory in the dinner hour or at six
o'clock. They are almost tumbling over each other in their hurry to get
away. They are putting on their jackets, pushing in their hatpins, and
running along as if their dinner were running away from them.

Something akin to that same attitude of rush we can see in any large
city when the clerks come out of the shops, for their luncheon hour, or
when the work of the day is over.

If we were to calculate in round numbers the amount of time saved by
this rush to get away from the shop, we should find three minutes,
probably the maximum--and if we balance that against the loss to body
and mind which is incurred, we should find the three minutes' gain
quite overweighted by the loss of many hours, perhaps days, because of
the illness which must be the result of such habitual contraction.

It is safe to predict when we see a woman rushing away from factory or
shop that she is not going to "let up" on that rate of speed until she
is back again at work. Indeed, having once started brain and body with
such an exaggerated impetus, it is not possible to quiet down without a
d