Rensselaer Journal, Volume 12, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 August 1902 — Why Not Rest. [ARTICLE]

Why Not Rest.

There is an irresistible inclination to rest and indulge in day dreaming this August weather. Even our indefatigable friend Meyers will admit this. The cool retreats along the Kankakee or a dip in the Iroquois at dark afford pleasant subjects for meditation and reverie. This natural tendency might be thought a mental and physical crime from the usual energy we show in combating it. The dwellers in sub-tropical climates have learned to yield a leisurely assent to the commands of heat, but people of more northern climes have a hereditary conviction that rest is evil, and under the impetus of this idea they make no change in the tenor in their lives from 'January to July. The wheels of every industry clash on, the trafficking up and down knows no stop nor stay. Three solid meals a day mast come regularly to tm table and all the settled routin&Cf life plod religiously on, although Mr. Mercury performs wonderful acrobatic feats and the worn body calls for rest. It is all a mistake. An appointment with a maple tree is the only business that is not better done tomorrow. When Dame Nature gives an invitation to rest, it should bear all the nature of a command which an invitation from a Queen does. It is time gained—not wasted. That sympathetic brother of the tree and the sky and the water, Thoreau, understood the matter thoroughly when he said: “Sometimes in a summer morning I sat at my sunny doorway from sunrise until noon, wrapt in reverie amid the pines and hickories and sumacs in undisturbed solitude, while birds sang around or noiselessly flitted through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window or the noise of some traveller’s wagon in the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night. They were not time subtracted from my life but over and above my usual allowance.” It is this view of rest as something distinctly seoarate from idleness that we need to cultivate. When we can really understand that right rest is growth, we can read the secret mes sage from the heart of the summer. “But,” asks a practical Washington street business man, “Did not Thoreau have money ? Could he not afford to ‘throw away his time’?” When he was writing those lines he lived in the log hut of his own building and subsisted solely on the fish he oaught and what he raised upon a half acre plat of ground nearby. It is all in the point of view. Thoreau felt himself infinitely rich living thus. In fact he set aside overtures of fortune that he might obtain spiritual growth in such ways as these. While we do not advocate such procedure upon the part of “busy men” we do think that every worke r should have his holiday about this time of year.