The wise student has, all through a hard term’s work, preserved the balance between work and play, society and solitude. Unless she has been particularly unfortunate she has come to the end of the term only healthily tired. By that I mean the kind of weariness from which recuperation is rapid and easy. She has not overdrawn her physical bank account. She has not run in debt to the future. Beware of any weariness of which that cannot be said.
The daily life of work and play for all of us ought to be so adjusted that each day’s strength is sufficient for each day’s needs. Wherever the conditions of work and play and of health are right, this is true. But school life, both for teachers and pupils, involves an unusual amount of wear and tear on the nervous system, and hence we should be more careful than others, industrial workers, for example, to see that this strain never becomes unduly severe. Few teachers or students could stand fifty weeks of school work in a year, an amount which in many occupations is accepted as a matter of course. That is the reason we have so many vacations. When vacation comes, then, let us realize its need, and its purpose; namely, to restore the balance of body and mind by allowing the beneficent restorative processes of Nature to do their work upon us; and let us coöperate heartily with these forces. Some do not do this, but hinder Nature instead of helping her. Some go home for a three weeks’ vacation and spend the entire time in a whirl of social dissipation. Ask yourself whether that restores your powers so that you return to your work with mind and body at their best? We rest, not for the sake of resting, but that we may work better. Vacations are given to restore the balance of life, not to destroy it.
And some students carry all their school worries and responsibilities with them into vacation. They dream of their work by night and think of it by day. They count up all the lessons that must be learned and all the themes that must be written, as if there would not be a day in which to do each day’s work. “Take no thought [worry] for the things of the morrow, for the morrow will take thought for the things of itself.”
And yet, when the long summer vacation comes, I wonder if even a young student is justified in using it all for play. We older people, if we are doing a work in the world which we consider worth while, take an entire summer for play but rarely. The reason is that life is too short for all one wants to learn or to accomplish, and so each long vacation must see the fulfillment of some of the tasks which we have set for ourselves. For the student there is a middle ground between working at school tasks all summer and idling during the entire time. Remember that a change of occupation is one form of rest. If a portion of each bountiful summer vacation were spent in learning something quite worth while, yet different from the ordinary school tasks, work and play would each profit from the other.
Have you sometimes been disturbed because you did not feel just like beginning hard work at the close of a vacation? Do not let that trouble you. I have learned to distrust a vacation at the close of which I find myself wearing the harness too easily. We get the most out of a vacation by making it as different as possible from our regular work. The more different it has been, the more difficult it is to get the mind back into the usual channels.
When the process of “getting up steam” is over, and we settle down to steady work after a good vacation, the sensation is one of the most delightful I know. Here is an opportunity to begin life all over again, and by retrieving the mistakes of the past, to make the future worthier. As the weeks stretch out ahead of us, they loom up big with opportunity and privilege. Start home for your next vacation, then, with a resolution in your heart that you will so spend it that when it is over, this new outlook upon life and work shall be yours; for the chief purpose of a vacation is to restore the rhythm of life.
VI
THE USES OF TROUBLE
“Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids not sit nor stand but go!”