SERENITY WITH NATURE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 January 1942, Page 4

SERENITY WITH NATURE

BENEFITS OF CALM. Peace and happiness are not dependent on materials other than those to sustain life and promote health, writes Mr Frank S. Smythe, the great I Alpine and Himalayan climber, in his new book “The Mountain Vision.” This great fact has yet to' be realised in the West. Yet it is beginning to be realised. Man is becoming more and more conscious of his environment. He sees himself not as some slave to material circumstance, but as a free entity capable of living and enjoying life in the sun and air amid the beauties of nature. Time to think and time (to contemplate are as necessary to a /man as time to work and time to be amused. A greater beauty and a greater peace are to be perceived through an hour spent seated on a hillside than in a hundred hours spent moving rapidly across' the face of the earth in a motor car or aeroplane. To live beautifully it is necessary to parcel out life into the correct proportions of action and inaction. Always to be doing something, or being amused by something, is soul-destroying in its ultimate effects. The clinics for nervous diseases are full of such cases. Nature teaches man the virtues of calm, of acting deliberately and thoughtfully. Nature cannot be rushed or bludgeoned without dire effects. Fertilise her with artificial stimulants and she becomes sterile; accelerate her processes and she becomes weak and impoverished. Mankind reacts in precisely the same manner. Let us adapt ourselves to Nature, not continually strive to force her to adapt herself to us.