REGULAR QUIET.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 165, 14 July 1928, Page 4 (Supplement)

REGULAR QUIET.

WOMAN'S GREAT NEED.

WIVES WHO DO TOO MUCH.

(By G. EDITH BURTON.)

In the rush and scramble of this age of oars, how many of us manage to get quiet each day, even for thirty minutes? Tet to do so is to use nature's own nerve sedative. If it were not pathetic, it would be most amusing to watch the hectic chaie for nerve relief—a nerveracking effort to cure racked nerves, when all the time a simple salve is the habit of "quiet" for mind and body. In this century, woman's deadliest enemy is nerve trouble, and when you take toll of colonial women's work yon marvel that she keeps going at all.

j Take the average woman, with a house, a husband, and three children. She is general factotum, save only a |"char."; is fond of entertaining as

funds permit, and of going out, too. Probably she makes ' most of her own, and all the: children's clothes. (She must to entertain- and -go out on an average income.) Then it i 3 easily understood that if she" crams a filmplay, two " bridges," one out and one in, a luncheon, several afternoon teas; bakes, makes, irons, cooks, and all the multitudinous that five people require, that she i 6 much overdrawn at thenervous system depot; ". When remonstrated with, she says, K always lie down for,half an hour after lunch." Well, that is better than nothing, I suppose, for she is certainly off her feet f?r that length of time. But is she resting? What is her brain doing? As likely as not it Is planning to-morrow's rather big luncheon, or a special bridge supper, or how to get a frock out of two yards three-quarters when the cruel pattern says "Not less than three," or shrinking from the thought of new loose covers for the drawing room, and thousands of fretting things which keep nerves all strung up and body unrelated. " What about a light book at that time!" suggests someone. No, even that requires effort. What yotr «eed to cultivate is the power to empty the mind, to stop thinking as far as is possible. A very difficult feat, but-so well worth the battle. It is especially hard for people who have got into the brooding habit, but it can be done. Also, it is specially hard in one's u.suul setting. If possible, find a nearby place where a sense of " quiet" comes when you have been quite still fori a quarter of an hour. Naturally, different natures find quiet in very opposite places. A very fortunate being known to the writer can get this sense of almost suspension in quite noisy scenes. Well, having found your congenial spot, try to empty your mind; make it as empty as a dry sponge. Strive for that state—almost like the borderland of sleep. Thoughts will intrude, but don't hold them; let them be like tiny clouds drifting across the blue.

Make an effort to let nothing interfere with this daily " rest" to your mind, and mark the difference. If you do it' thoroughly you will need no bromide for special efforts. - *

A woman I know <very well spent her early girlhood on a very quiet farm. As she had no young people around her, she would jspend hours just wandering around different bits of wild bush on the farm. In very dense bits she would stand, held by the wonderful stillness— the quiet, and soon she formed the habit of a daily time of mental rest. "I am a'fraid," she told me, " that perhaps I overdid it, for if I have visitors who are exacting of my time, and stay a good many weeks, Igo all to tatters." This, of course, only goes to prove that in everything one can over train.