SAVING OF EFFORT
Rocked in the cradle of the deep
I lay me down in peace to sleep.
EMMA WILLARD.
The unsatisfied longing for rest in all mankind will be attributed to
different causes according to the way we look at life. The physical or
animal man desires rest because of the relief it will bring to nerves
and muscles wearied by the strain of activities; he feels that to relax
will bring him some ease and that relaxation will help him to forget
the bodily weariness. Recovering from weariness or pain is a pleasure
in itself. The sigh of relief is really a sigh of pleasure.
When the mind reigns, it instinctively recognizes that rest would
restore the balance disturbed by feverish exertions. Our whole lives
seem passed in a struggle to attain something, and the law of rhythm,
which is the law of action and reaction, requires that, after struggle,
effort should cease. One implies the other; neither effort nor true
rest can continue steadily. Effort is the breaking of rest; shadow is
only the relative absence of light.
It is contrast that makes sensations; the shadow serves to make the
light brighter; the night makes the day more fair; and noon makes the
night darker. Tennyson recognized this in the line, “Sorrow’s crown of
sorrow is remembering happier things.” He might have said, with equal
truth, that the present joy has a warmer flush because of forgotten
pain.
Wagner understood that, and so we find crash and seeming inharmony
so often a prelude to the softest, tenderest strains. The mind first
wearies of monotony, even of harmony, and then ceases to be able to
perceive it. Wagner saw this, and introduced clashing sound that
seems like discord until we feel its connection with the emotion and
the context of the piece. These relieve the emotions and throw the
harmonies into relief. Says Hobbes: to have one sensation and to have
it continually would be to have none.
The mental man feels and knows all this, and to him rest becomes
necessary to restore that balance of things that contrast suggests—rest
after effort, peace after turmoil.
The spiritual man goes still deeper into true conditions in his longing
for rest. Rest carries with it the idea of attainment. He who has
attained has peace: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto
you.” The unity of all three desires—that of the body, that of the
mind, and that of the spirit—cannot fail to strike the thinker. To
cease to strain is the keynote of ease. Why? Because man sees, however
dimly, that agonizing, like antagonizing, is really futile, and that
the only thing that is necessary is to put one’s self in harmony with
the Universe.
Herbert Spencer has shown that grace of movement consists in the
economy of effort, in doing every act with the least possible waste
of power. The same thought is the basis of the teaching of the great
Delsarte. As Ruskin says: “Is not the evidence of ease on the very
front of all the greatest works in existence? Do they not say plainly
to us, not ‘there has been a great effort here,’ but ‘there has been
a great power here’? It is not the weariness of mortality, but the
strength of divinity, which we have to recognize in all things; and
this is just what we now never recognize, but think that we shall do
great things by the help of iron bars and perspiration. Alas! we shall
do nothing that way, but lose some pounds of our own weight.” The best
way to attain anything is to move towards it with the least possible
jarring or friction. In every struggle we lose force, because we are
sure to make unnecessary motions. Men do not learn this from their
daily work as unconsciously as they once did, because machinery has
so largely displaced handwork. But, even in using machinery, he is the
best workman who has learned to run his machine and get good results
with the least expenditure of physical effort. Such a workman remains
fresh for a longer period, and accomplishes more in a given time. The
machine itself is constructed upon the principle of saving effort—it
cuts out all unnecessary motion and reduces friction as much as
possible.
If you watch a skilled typesetter at his case, you will find that
apparently he is never in a rush. The beginner, especially if he is one
of the more nervous type, looks anxious, pauses with hand fluttering
above the case while he considers in which box he will find the letter
he seeks; then, when he has made a decision, he will pounce upon it
and deposit it in the stick with breathless haste. Not so the seasoned
compositor. There is no haste, no fluttering, no waste motion. His hand
goes unerringly to the box where he will find the letter he wants, in
a twinkling it is in place in the stick, and another letter disposed
of in the same way, and you are scarcely conscious of motion. The
perfect workman is he who has learned to accomplish most with the least
expenditure of effort. It is toward this perfection that Frederick
W. Taylor and others are striving in the new “Business Efficiency.”
Every day we are surprised to learn that what _we_ gained by hard
struggle has been gained with scarcely an effort by another. It does
not always make us happy to learn it. We often feel as if we had been
tricked, and we think that effort spent in what we now see was not the
most effective way, was wasted. This leads us sometimes to persist in a
mistaken course, because we are unwilling to believe that we have lost
so much time and missed so much result. But no effort is ever wasted:
it is only by the effort to do well that we can learn to do better.
Nothing is commoner than to hear our friends say, “I don’t sleep—the
work is so hard and exacting I get dead tired and then toss about
all night.” But it is not the work, rather it is the worker that is
exacting.