No man or woman can work every day, year in and year out, with no change, no variety in his life, without either getting into a rut .which will paralyze his finest and best faculties, or breaking down altogether and shortening years of precious life.
A great many people, especially in cities, fail, lose their health, and become mere apologies of the men and women they might be if they knew how to take care of themselves, — if they were wise enough to take a vacation when they need it. But they voluntarily cut themselves off, year after year, from the great source of power, — nature. They do not drink from the fountain of vitality and eternal youth and energy in which the earth is constantly renewing itself. Buried in schemes of ambition, of self-aggrandizement, in dreams of wealth and power and fame, they grind away in an environment of bricks and mortar, in the stifling, changeless atmosphere of the city, until they become nervous, worn-out wrecks. They do not see the necessity of change; they do not believe in taking a vacation; they laugh at the idea of giving up their work and going away to idle in the country, as they put it, until it is too late. Many of these ceaseless toilers are living on their nerves, trying all sorts of patent medicines, massage treatments, and other artificial remedies, in the hope of regaining health and strength. But they find these things very poor substitutes for the recreating rejuvenating forces of the country.
How much money would you give a physician if he would guarantee you strong, steady, healthy faculties, instead of nervous, exhausted ones; if he could restore elasticity to your lagging footsteps; if he could give you firm, vigorous muscles instead of weak, flabby ones; if he could put new courage and hope into your life; if he could, by some magic, take away the fretful, nervous, irritable feeling which makes you so unhappy, and restore you to your usual cool, calm, collected, cheerful demeanor? You would not stop at any price you could afford to pay. Yet you can do all this yourself if you will only drop everything and fly to the country for rest and change and complete emancipation from business cares. Let your business for the time be to recuperate and to grow strong.
A great many business and professional men are practically slaves to their vocation. They are a part of its machinery. They have become victims of routine. They do what they do today because they did it yesterday. It is easier to go back to the accustomed task than to make a change of any kind, no matter how much they may need it.
I have lived for years near a man who says he never could afford to take a vacation. I have called at his office a great many times, but have never found him at leisure; he is always on the grind; there is no letup in his work from one year's end to another; he believes in the gospel of hard, unremitting work for himself and everybody around him. He says that all this talk about rest and vacation is nonsense; that time taken from business is time wasted; that life is too short for one to go out into the country and sit around doing nothing.
The result is that his close application to work through all these years has broken down his health. His hand trembles so that he can scarcely sign a check. His once vigorous, firm step has given way to an uncertain, lagging one, and there are evidences of weakness in his very bearing. He gives you the impression of a man who is just about to collapse, yet he refuses to give up work or to take a vacation. Although the man has made money, he is a complete failure. No one who works for him sympathizes with him, because they think he is too mean and stingy to take a rest. His family, as well as his employees, avoid him, because he has become so crabbed and disagreeable. He is a mere business machine — hard, cold, and unresponsive to human emotions. If one were to show him a picture of himself as he really is — as the years of grind and drudgery have made him — he would not believe it was a true one. He thinks he is the same free, open-hearted, generous fellow that he was in his youth.
Everywhere we see duplicates of this man who could not afford to take a vacation. He is listlessly dragging his feet along the streets, trying, now and then, to force himself, by sheer will-power, to express energy which he does not possess. We see him at home — fretful, irritable, morose — pushing away from the children whom he once loved to caress and play with. He cannot bear their noise, or enter into their childish fun. He tries to get away in a corner by himself, with his paper or book. He feels injured because he thinks his wife does not make as much of him as she used to. He does not realize that in his nervous moodiness he has repelled her loving attentions and caresses so often that she shrinks from repeating them. All unconsciously, he is severing the tenderest ties of his family life, and making his home miserable.
We finally see this man, who once imagined he could not afford to take a vacation, at foreign resorts, drinking the waters and taking mud baths. We see him at hot springs, sulphur springs — all sorts of mineral springs — trying to recover what he bartered for a mess of pottage. He is taking long trips in automobiles; he is on steamships and yachts seeking health on the ocean; he is traveling from place to place, consulting the world's great specialists, trying to get back the vigor and vitality he lost in exchange for the money he made while toiling along year after year without rest or change.
The brain will very quickly tell you when it needs a vacation. When it demands a change, it will give you signs that cannot be mistaken. It will humiliate you often enough, and make you wonder whether or not you are a real man or woman, when you lose your self-control and fly into a rage over the merest trifles; when you have to force yourself to the work that was formerly a delight; when you begin to feel dull and languid and irritable; when your ambition and enthusiasm begin to wane; when your head aches, your eye loses its luster, and your step its elasticity. Whether you are a student, a business or professional man or woman, or a homemaker, these are symptoms which you cannot afford to ignore. They are Nature's reminders that you must stop, or take the consequences. If you do not heed her warnings, she will make you pay the penalty, though it be with your life. Whether king or beggar, it is all the same to her. Beware how you presume to do what Nature prohibits. She will warn you once, twice, thrice, perhaps oftener, but from her final sentence there is no appeal.
Many a man has been carried to his rest in a hearse years before his natural span of life was run, because he put off his vacation until he could afford the time. Others are in hospitals, sanitariums, and asylums, helpless wrecks from paresis, over-taxed brains, shattered nerves, or broken down constitutions, because they thought they could not afford a few weeks' vacation every year.
We notice that the men who tell you they cannot get out of harness even for a week, because their business or profession presses them so, are not, as a rule, as good businessmen, and do not succeed as well in their professions, as the men who take time to recuperate and grow. There have been great changes in business methods in the past twenty-five years. The more progressive men, those who are capable of making and carrying out a programme in a large way, have broken away from the old slavery of their predecessors. They do not spend as many hours in the office, but they can do more and better work in less time, because they have better facilities; they are fresher and more spontaneous, because their faculties are not jaded and worn out by long hours of drudgery.
When will men learn that power does not come from bricks and stones and artificial environment? If we would gain in force and originality, we must go back to a simpler life. We have become too artificial. We must touch mother earth. We must drink in power from the babbling brook, from the meadow, from the mountain. We must drink in beauty from flower and field, and tree and sunset, or we shall go backward instead of forward. Growth and power, strength and efficiency must be our aim. To do our best, we must be healthy, strong. If we grind incessantly, this is impossible.
Does It Pay?
Does it pay to regain your cheerful personality?
Does it pay to sip power from its very fountain head?
Does it pay to increase your creative power and originality
Does it pay to get a firmer grip on your business or profession?
Does it pay to regain your lost confidence by up-building your health?
Do you want to get rid of the scars and stains of the year 's campaign?
Will a fresh, vigorous brain serve you better than a fagged, jaded one?
Does it pay to exchange flaccid, stiffened muscles for strong, elastic ones?
Does it pay to get a new grip upon life and to double your power to do good work?
Does it pay to put iron into the blood and to absorb granite strength from the everlasting hills?
Does it pay to renew the buoyancy and light-heartedness, the spontaneity and enthusiasm of youth?
Does it pay to get in tune with the Infinite by drinking in the medicinal tonic from the everlasting hills?
Does it pay to get rid of your nagging, rasping disposition so that you can attract people instead of repelling them?
Does it pay to get rid of some of our narrow prejudices, hatreds, and jealousies that are encouraged by the strenuous city life?
Does it pay to add to the comfort and happiness of ourselves and those about us by being brighter and more cheerful ourselves?
Does it pay to make the most of all the powers that God has given you by bringing superb health and vitality to your aid in developing them?
Does it pay to develop our powers of observation; to learn to read books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything?
Does it pay to put beauty into the life, to gather serenity and poise from the sweet music of the running brooks and the thousand voices in nature?
Is it better to be a full-rounded man or woman with large views and a wide outlook, or a mere automatic machine running in the same old grooves year after year?
Is it a good investment to exchange a few dollars for a great deal of health and happiness; to economize on that which the very wellsprings of our being depend?
Does it pay to be free, for a time, from the petty annoyances that vex, hinder, and exasperate; to get out of ruts and the old beaten tracks and take in a stock of brand-new ideas?
Does it pay to get away from the hot bricks and mortar of the city and breathe the pure air of the country; to become rejuvenated and refreshened by breathing the untainted and invigorating air of the country?
Is it better to go to your task with a hopeful outlook than to drag yourself to your work like an unwilling slave; to go through life halting, weak, inefficient, pessimistic, or to be strong, vigorous, self-reliant and optimistic?
Does it pay to save five per cent of your income by economizing on your vacation this year and break down next year from the continued strain and be obliged to pay fifty per cent, for doctor's bills, besides the time lost in enforced idleness?
Does it pay the hard-worked, nerve-racked, deskbound man to lock his business cares in his office or store and be free once more; to exchange exhausted and irritable nerves for sound, healthy ones, which will carry pleasurable sensations instead of rasping ones?