or work
and play--there is with one who has in the background always the
ability to stop and do nothing.

If we observe enough, carefully enough, and quietly enough, to get
sensitive to it, we can see how every one about us is living in
excitement. I have seen women with nothing important to do come down to
breakfast in excitement, give their orders for the day as if they were
about running for a fire; and the standard of all those about them is
so low that no one notices what a human dust is stirred up by all this
flutter over nothing.

A man told me not long ago that he got tired out for the day in walking
to his office with a friend, because they both talked so intensely. And
that is not an unusual experience. This chronic state of strain and
excitement in everyday matters makes a mental atmosphere which is akin
to what the material atmosphere would be if we were persistently
kicking up a dust in the road every step we took. Every one seems to be
stirring up his own especial and peculiar dust and adding it to every
one else's especial and peculiar dust.

We are all mentally, morally and spiritually sneezing or choking with
our own dust and the dust of other people. How is it possible for us to
get any clear, all-round view of life so long as the dust stirring
habit is on us? So far from being able to enlarge our horizon, we can
get no horizon at all, and so no perspective until this human dust is
laid. And there is just this one thing about it, that is a delight to
think of: When we know how to live so that our own dust is laid, that
very habit of life keeps us clear from the dust of other people. Not
only that, but when we are free from dust ourselves, the dust that the
other men are stirring up about us does not interfere with our view of
them. We see the men through their dust and we see how the dust with
which they are surrounding themselves befogs them and impedes their
progress. From the place of no dust you can distinguish dust and see
through it. From the place of dust you cannot distinguish anything
clearly. Therefore, if one wishes to learn the standards of living
according to plain common sense, for body, mind, and spirit, and to
apply the principles of such standards practically to their every-day
life, the first absolute necessity is to get quiet and to stay quiet
long enough to lay the dust.

You may know the laws of right eating, of right breathing, of exercise,
and rest--but in this dust of excit