WORRY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIII, Issue II, 14 July 1894, Page 44

WORRY.

Worry is the most dangerous penalty of modern progress. How the word grew into use we cannot say ; perhaps it was through observations similar to those recorded by delightful Dolly Winthrop in ‘Silas Marner’ respecting the pups which the lads were always rearing. • They will worry and gnaw, worry and gnaw they will, if it was one’s Sunday cap as hung anywhere so as they could drag it 1’ One of the commonest expressions used by doctors, when their patients seek remedy for the nervous wear and tear and exhaustion which our over-busy life entails, is that • worry kills, not work.’ Worry is the attempt to do half-a-dozen things at once, like a conjuror’s trick, but to do it seriously and constantly with strained attention.

ft is the being pulled different ways by equally importunate calls ; it is the care of one piece of work sitting on one’s shoulders while another piece of work is being done ; it is the mental indecision that makes us halt, facing two roads, and, when one road is taken, it is the uneasiness and

sense of vacuum which accompanies us because the other road has been left.

But it is more than the extreme perplexity which dogs the steps of the over-busy ; it is the uncertainty that clings to almost all our speculative modern business ; we are seated at a gaming-table all our lives, or rather have stakes on a dozen gaming tables if we are in the press of business or if we are even pursuing an ordinary professional round. And worry is finally the fear of the slow crushing grind that comes with failure in an age when failure means the loss of much that we have thought best worth having. Too much to do, to little time for the effort, uncertainty as to the outcome, and fear of being forced back into the gulf where the unsuccessful are lost—these form the component parts of business worry.

Mental irritation of the same character as is produced by business uncertainty may be felt in a lighter form, though not less persistently, by mothers who are never free from the care of a young family. How seldom do we recognise the wear and tear that rack the women who are rearing a large family ! We meet a woman whom we knew as a merry young girl, plump, bonny and high-spirited ; only half a dozen years have passed, but she is angular, drawn, dragged down, sharp faced, weary, pale and dispirited—an aged, careworn outline of her former self.

The difference has been made for the most part by the unceasing worry of a band of children, too dear for neglect, too lively to admit of rest. It is not only that the anxious mother must be always afoot, working in ways that are overlooked when men reckon up the total of toil and average the hours of labour, but she has a constant nerve friction to withstand in the succession of anxieties that make up her day. The little girl’s injunction to her companion, ‘ Go and see what baby is doing, and tell it it mustn’t,’ has often been laughed at, but it is an index finger to a world of care suffered by solicitous mothers. Of course the troubles of the household are chiefly small ; they are not comparable to the grave difficulties with which the father battles if be is fighting his way in the world of business ; but none the less they form a very disagreeable companionship ; and they induce that state of irritability and nerve sensitiveness which is the distinguishing symptom of worry.