If you will observe yourself carefully with a desire to find the hurry tendency, and to find it thoroughly, in order to eliminate it, you will be surprised to see how much of it there is in you.
The trouble is that all our standards are low, and to raise our standards we must drop that which interferes with the most wholesome way of living.
As we get rid of all the grosser forms of hurry we find in ourselves other hurry habits that are finer and more subtle, and gradually our standards of quiet, deliberate ways get higher; we become more sensitive to hurry, and a hurried way of doing things grows more and more disagreeable to us.
Watch the women coming out of a factory in the dinner hour or at six o'clock. They are almost tumbling over each other in their hurry to get away. They are putting on their jackets, pushing in their hatpins, and running along as if their dinner were running away from them.
Something akin to that same attitude of rush we can see in any large city when the clerks come out of the shops, for their luncheon hour, or when the work of the day is over.
If we were to calculate in round numbers the amount of time saved by this rush to get away from the shop, we should find three minutes, probably the maximum—and if we balance that against the loss to body and mind which is incurred, we should find the three minutes' gain quite overweighted by the loss of many hours, perhaps days, because of the illness which must be the result of such habitual contraction.
It is safe to predict when we see a woman rushing away from factory or shop that she is not going to "let up" on that rate of speed until she is back again at work. Indeed, having once started brain and body with such an exaggerated impetus, it is not possible to quiet down without a direct and decided use of the will, and how is that decided action to be taken if the brain is so befogged with the habit of hurry that it knows no better standard?
One of the girls from a large factory came rushing up to the kind, motherly head of the boarding house the other day saying:—
"It is abominable that I should be kept waiting so long for my dinner. I have had my first course and here I have been waiting twenty minutes for my dessert."
The woman addressed looked up quietly to the clock and saw that it was ten minutes past twelve.