Our
complex modern life, especially in our larger
centers, gets us running so many times into grooves
that we are prone to miss, and sometimes for long
periods, the all-around, completer life. We
are led at times almost to forget that the stars
come nightly to the sky, or even that there is a
sky; that there are hedgerows and groves where the
birds are always singing and where we can lie on our
backs and watch the treetops swaying above us and
the clouds floating by an hour or hours at a time;
where one can live with his or her soul or, as
Whitman has put it, where one can loaf and invite
one's soul.
We
need changes from the duties and the cares of our
accustomed everyday life. They are necessary
for healthy, normal living. We need
occasionally to be away from our friends, our
relatives, from the members of our immediate
households. Such changes are good for us; they
are good for them. We appreciate them better,
they us, when we are away from them for a period, or
they from us.
We
need these changes occasionally in order to find new
relations--this is a twofold sense. By such
changes there come to our minds more clearly the
better qualities of those with whom we are in
constant association; we lose sight of the little
frictions and irritations that arise; we see how we
can be more considerate, appreciative, kind.
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In
one of those valuable essays of Prentice Mulford
entitled "Who Are Our Relations?" he
points us to the fact, and with so much insight and
common sense, that our relations are not always or
necessarily those related to us by blood ties, those
of our immediate households, but those most nearly
allied to us in mind and in spirit, many times those
we have never seen, but that we shall sometime,
somewhere be drawn to through ceaselessly working
Law of Attraction, whose basis is like attracts
like.
And so in staying too closely with
the accustomed relations we may miss the knowledge
and the companionship of those equally or even more
closely related.
We
need these changes to get the kinks out of our
minds, our nerves, our muscles--the cobwebs off our
faces. We need them to whet again the edge of
appetite. We need them to invite the mind and
the soul to new possibilities and powers. We
need them in order to come back with new implements,
or with implements redressed, sharpened, for the
daily duties. It is like the chopper working
too long with axe underground. There comes the
time when an hour at the stone will give it such
persuasive power that he can chop and cord in the
day what he otherwise would in two or more, and with
far greater ease and satisfaction.
We
need periods of being by ourselves--alone.
Sometimes a fortnight or even a week will do wonders
for one, unless he or she has drawn too heavily upon
the account. The simple custom, moreover, of
taking an hour, or even a half hour, alone in the
quiet, in the midst of the daily routine of
life, would be the source of inestimable gain
for countless numbers.
If
such changes can be in closer contact with the
fields and with the flowers that are in them, the
stars and the sea that lies open beneath them, the
woods and the wild things that are of them, one
cannot help but find oneself growing in love for and
an ever fuller appreciation of these, and being at
the same time so remade and unfolded that one's
love, one's care, and one's consideration for all
mankind and for every living creature, will be the
greater.
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