CHAPTER XLIV
REST IN TRUTH
The timely dew of sleep.
Milton.
It is not our work that wears us, but the way we take it. So long as we think of rest as meaning only inactivity, just so long will the activities of life exhaust us. Goethe said:
“Rest is not quitting the busy career,
Rest is fitting oneself for one’s sphere.”
When we do that, we find rest. But we may ask what is one’s sphere and how may one fit one’s self for it? If we wish to answer that truly, we must be willing to have some common misconceptions brushed away. The sphere of any individual is limited only by the possibilities of his own body, mind, and spirit. Our sphere is not a small circle of activities whose boundaries any man may mark. It widens as our inner nature expands, and what was the horizon line yesterday will be but a tiny hillock near at hand to-morrow. It includes all that has been achieved, and all that may be attained by the race.
The best standard of our life is not only what the race as a whole has achieved in the way of development, but the highest and best that any person has yet taught or lived; this is the true measure of man’s sphere to-day. Ordinarily, we talk of man’s sphere and woman’s sphere as if there were a clear line of separation between them, and each were continued in its own little space. This could not be, for, so long as men and women have the same three natures—bodily, mental, spiritual—so long as we have similar needs, aims, and aspirations, the larger sphere of man, whether male or female, is the same, and is bounded only by the possibilities of the life of all three natures.
To fit one’s self for such a sphere should bring rest while we are doing it, because that fitting means becoming harmonious with the purposes of the larger life; and rest is simply harmony, at-one-ness with the Universe.
The possibilities of the life of all three natures are inexhaustible. We have never touched the limit of even the physical man. Man at one time had only his hands for tools, and so was limited in his powers. But he used his mind to increase the power of his hands, and reached out for sticks and stones to help him. In time his thought devised implements that increased his physical power a thousandfold, until now he has harnessed not only steam, but the very currents of the air, and is making himself all-powerful.