Nerves and Common Sense Part 11

Our stomachs are all right if we will but fulfill their most simple conditions and then leave them alone. If we treat them right they will tell us what is good for them and what is not good for them, and if we will only pay attention, obey them as a matter of course without comment and then forget them, there need be no more fuss about food and very much less nervous irritability.

CHAPTER XVII

Take Care of Your Stomach

WE all know that we have a great deal to do. Some of us have to work all day to earn our bread and b.u.t.ter and then work a good part of the night to make our clothes. Some of us have to stand all day behind a counter. Some of us have to sit all day and sew for others, and all night to sew for ourselves and our children. Most of us have to do work that is necessary or work that is self-imposed. Many of us feel busy without really being busy at all. But how many of us realize that while we are doing work outside, our bodies themselves have good, steady work to do inside.

Our lungs have to take oxygen from the air and give it to our blood; our blood has to carry it all through our bodies and take away the waste by means of the steady pumping of our hearts. Our stomachs must digest the food put into them, give the nourishment in it to the blood, and see that the waste is cast off.

All this work is wholesome and good, and goes on steadily, giving us health and strength and new power; but if we, through mismanagement, make heart or lungs or stomach work harder than they should, then they must rob us of power to accomplish what we give them to do, and we blame them, instead of blaming ourselves for being hard and unjust taskmasters.

The strain in a stomach necessary to the digesting of too much food, or the wrong kind of food, makes itself felt in strain all through the whole system.

I knew a woman whose conscience was troubling her very greatly. She was sure she had done many very selfish things for which there was no excuse, and that she herself was greatly to blame for other people's troubles. This was a very acute attack of conscience, accompanied by a very severe stomach ache. The doctor was called in and gave her an emetic. She threw a large amount of undigested food from her stomach, and after that relief the weight on her conscience was lifted entirely and she had nothing more to blame herself with than any ordinary, wholesome woman must have to look out for every day of her life.

This is a true story and should be practically useful to readers who need it. This woman's stomach had been given too much to do. It worked hard to do its work well, and had to rob the brain and nervous system in the effort. This effort brought strain to the whole brain, which was made evident in the region of the conscience. It might have come out in some other form. It might have appeared in irritability. It might even have shown itself in downright ugliness.

Whatever the effects are, whether exaggerated conscience, exaggerated anxiety, or irritability, the immediate cause of the trouble in such cases as I refer to is in the fact that the stomach has been given too much to do.

We give the stomach too much to do if we put a great deal of food into it when it is tired. We give it too much to do if we put into it the wrong kind of food. We give it too much to do if we insist upon working hard ourselves, either with body or brain, directly after a hearty meal.

No matter how busy we are we can protect our stomachs against each and all of these three causes of trouble.

If a woman is very tired her stomach must necessarily be very tired also. If she can remember that at such times even though she may be very hungry, her body is better nourished if she takes slowly a cup of hot milk, and waits until she is more rested before taking solid food, than if she ate a hearty meal. It will save a strain, and perhaps eventually severe illness.

If it is possible to rest and do absolutely nothing for half an hour before a meal, and for half an hour after that insures the best work for our digestion. If one is pretty well, and cannot spare the half hour, ten or fifteen minutes will do, unless there is a great deal of fatigue to be conquered.

If it is necessary to work right up to mealtime, let up a little before stopping. As the time for dinner approaches do not work quite so hard; the work will not lose; in the end it will gain-and when you begin work again begin lightly, and get into the thick of it gradually. That gives your stomach a good chance.

If possible get a long rest before the last meal, and if your day is very busy, it is better to have the heartiest meal at the end of it, to take a good rest afterward and then a walk in the fresh air, which may be long or short, according to what other work you have to do or according to how tired you are.

I know many women will say: "But I am tired all the time; if I waited to rest before I ate, I should starve."

The answer to that is "protect your stomach as well as you can. If you cannot rest before and after each meal try to arrange some way by which you can get rid of a little fatigue."

If you do this with attention and interest you will find gradually that you are less tired all the time, and as you keep on steadily toward the right path, you may be surprised some day to discover that you are only tired half the time, and perhaps even reach the place where the tired feeling will be the exception.

It takes a good while to get our misused stomachs into wholesome ways, but if we are persistent and intelligent we can surely do it, and the relief to the overstrained stomach-as I have said-means relief to the whole body.

Resting before and after meals amounts to very little, however, if we eat food that is not nourishing.

Some people are so far out of the normal way of eating that they have lost a wholesome sense of what is good for them, and live in a chronic state of disordered stomach, which means a chronic state of disordered nerves and disposition. If such persons could for one minute literally experience the freedom of a woman whose body was truly and thoroughly nourished, the contrast from the abnormal to the normal would make them dizzy. If, however, they stayed in the normal place long enough to get over the dizziness, the freedom of health would be so great a delight that food that was not nourishing would be nauseous to them.

Most of us are near enough the normal to know the food that is best for us, through experience of suffering from food which is not best for us, as well as through good natural instinct.

If we would learn from the normal working of the involuntary action of our organs, it might help us greatly toward working more wholesomely in all our voluntary actions.

If every woman who reads this article would study not to interfere with the most healthy action of her own stomach, her reward after a few weeks' persistent care would be not only a greater power for work, but a greater power for good, healthy, recuperative rest.

CHAPTER XVIII

About Faces

WATCH the faces as you walk along the street! If you get the habit of noticing, your observations will grow keener. It is surprising to see how seldom we find a really quiet face. I do not mean that there should be no lines in the face. We are here in this world at school and we cannot have any real schooling unless we have real experiences. We cannot have real experiences without suffering, and suffering which comes from the discipline of life and results in character leaves lines in our faces. It is the lines made by unnecessary strain to which I refer.

Strange to say the unquiet faces come mostly from shallow feeling. Usually the deeper the feeling the less strain there is on the face. A face may look troubled, it may be full of pain, without a touch of that strain which comes from shallow worry or excitement.

The strained expression takes character out of the face, it weakens it, and certainly it detracts greatly from whatever natural beauty there may have been to begin with. The expression which comes from pain or any suffering well borne gives character to the face and adds to its real beauty as well as its strength.

To remove the strained expression we must remove the strain behind; therefore the hardest work we have to do is below the surface. The surface work is comparatively easy.

I know a woman whose face is quiet and placid. The lines are really beautiful, but they are always the same. This woman used to watch herself in the gla.s.s until she had her face as quiet and free from lines as she could get it-she used even to arrange the corners of her mouth with her fingers until they had just the right droop.

Then she observed carefully how her face felt with that placid expression and studied to keep it always with that feeling, until by and by her features were fixed and now the placid face is always there, for she has established in her brain an automatic vigilance over it that will not allow the muscles once to get "out of drawing."

What kind of an old woman this acquaintance of mine will make I do not know. I am curious to see her-but now she certainly is a most remarkable hypocrite. The strain in behind the mask of a face which she has made for herself must be something frightful. And indeed I believe it is, for she is ill most of the time-and what could keep one in nervous illness more entirely than this deep interior strain which is necessary to such external appearance of placidity.

There comes to my mind at once a very comical ill.u.s.tration of something quite akin to this although at first thought it seems almost the reverse. A woman who constantly talked of the preeminency of mind over matter, and the impossibility of being moved by external circ.u.mstances to any one who believed as she did-this woman I saw very angry.

She was sitting with her face drawn in a hundred cross lines and all askew with her anger. She had been spouting and sputtering what she called her righteous indignation for some minutes, when after a brief pause and with the angry expression still on her face she exclaimed: "Well, I don't care, it's all peace within."

I doubt if my masked lady would ever have declared to herself or to any one else that "it was all peace within." The angry woman was-without doubt-the deeper hypocrite, but the masked woman had become rigid in her hypocrisy. I do not know which was the weaker of the two, probably the one who was deceiving herself.

But to return to those drawn, strained lines we see on the people about us. They do not come from hard work or deep thought. They come from unnecessary contractions about the work. If we use our wills consistently and steadily to drop such contractions, the result is a more quiet and restful way of living, and so quieter and more attractive faces.

This unquietness comes especially in the eyes. It is a rare thing to see a really quiet eye; and very pleasant and beautiful it is when we do see it. And the more we see and observe the unquiet eyes and the unquiet faces the better worth while it seems to work to have ours more quiet, but not to put on a mask, or be in any other way a hypocrite.

The exercise described in a previous chapter will help to bring a quiet face. We must drop our heads with a sense of letting every strain go out of our faces, and then let our heads carry our bodies down as far as possible, dropping strain all the time, and while rising slowly we must take the same care to drop all strain.

In taking the long breath, we must inhale without effort, and exhale so easily that it seems as if the breath went out of itself, like the balloons that children blow up and then watch them shrink as the air leaves them.

Five minutes a day is very little time to spend to get a quiet face, but just that five minutes-if followed consistently-will make us so much more sensitive to the unquiet that we will sooner or later turn away from it as by a natural instinct.

CHAPTER XIX

About Voices

I KNEW an old German-a wonderful teacher of the speaking voice-who said "the ancients believed that the soul of the man is here"-pointing to the pit of his stomach. "I do not know," and he shrugged his shoulders with expressive interest, "it may be and it may not be-but I know the soul of the voice is here-and you Americans-you squeeze the life out of the word in your throat and it is born dead."