f your
ability; give your attention so entirely to the process of gaining
health for the sake of your work and other people that you have no mind
left with which to complain of being ill, and see that all this effort
aims toward a more intelligent obedience to and trustfulness in the
Power that gives us life. Wholesome, sustained concentration is in the
very essence of healthy nerves.

CHAPTER III

_"You Have no Idea how I am Rushed"_

A WOMAN can feel rushed when she is sitting perfectly still and has
really nothing whatever to do. A woman can feel at leisure when she is
working diligently at something, with a hundred other things waiting to
be done when the time comes. It is not all we have to do that gives us
the rushed feeling; it is the way we do what is before us. It is the
attitude we take toward our work.

Now this rushed feeling in the brain and nerves is intensely
oppressive. Many women, and men too, suffer from it keenly, and they
suffer the more because they do not recognize that that feeling of rush
is really entirely distinct from what they have to do; in truth it has
nothing whatever to do with it.

I have seen a woman suffer painfully with the sense of being pushed for
time when she had only two things to do in the whole day, and those two
things at most need not take more than an hour each. This same woman
was always crying for rest. I never knew, before I saw her, that women
could get just as abnormal in their efforts to rest as in their
insistence upon overwork. This little lady never rested when she went
to rest; she would lie on the bed for hours in a state of strain about
resting that was enough to tire any ordinarily healthy woman. One
friend used to tell her that she was an inebriate on resting. It is
perhaps needless to say that she was a nervous invalid, and in the
process of gaining her health she had to be set to work and kept at
work. Many and many a time she has cried and begged for rest when it
was not rest she needed at all: it was work.

She has started off to some good, healthy work crying and sobbing at
the cruelty that made her go, and has returned from the work as happy
and healthy, apparently, as a little child. Then she could go to rest
and rest to some purpose. She had been busy in wholesome action and the
normal reaction came in her rest. As she grew more naturally interested
in her work she rested less and less, and she rested better and better
because she had so