THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 11, 1909. EXERCISE AND REST.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9565, 11 August 1909, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 11, 1909. EXERCISE AND REST.

One of perhaps mails' reforms that human nature is achieving half unconsciously ia that of it 9 liberation from the world-old tyranny of proverbial "wisdom." We are instinctively a saw-ridden race, meekly accepting a statement as gospel because it got into phrase-currency in our grandfather's time and relinquishing a tradition reluctantly even after it has been exploded by the dynamite of experience. Thus some supposed wise-acre once put into circulation the delusion that early to bed and early to rise made people healthy, wealthy and wise. On which fair comrnent/wouid be that it is hopeless to think of making people wise who are so foolish as to "rise" with the birds risking colds, setting the human machine to work when it has run dry and needs lubricating with nourishment, and making the breaking morning miserable for themselves and everyone else within the precincts. Whatever faddists may say to the contrary, the average man is anything but a chirping lark first thing in the -.morning. He has been away and needs to come back to the day's vyoyk gradually. By the same token , it is a misguided citiaett who goes to bed very early, since his system slowly winds ttuelf up as the day wears on and wants to run down in the same way, by easy stages. Very many are only at concert pitch when evening sets in, perhaps because then the time approaches when the human , clock will strike twelve. Much of the world's best intellectual work is done after dark. Ihen the master statesman usually makes the speech that shakes the land, the great judge prepares his great judgment, and men in other professions work at the discovery that to-morrow will relieve humanity from some malignantly triumphant disease, the engineering feat that will do the- hitherto impracticable, the law that will make life easier and sweeter. These, roughly speaking, aro the wise, the directing minds of the species—and they devise and plan by night, giving the ' day to mere execution of after-dark wisdom. Yet they must rest both body and mind, and how to do that rjcuperatively is the question. "Take plenty of exercise" is a saying with the root of reason in it, but on« which we see often misapplied in ignorance that healthy pxercise is simply rest and change of function. The human furnace is always consuming while it is at work, and always making slag. In an illuminative discussion of this subject Dr. Woods Hutchinson, the well-known

American writer 0:1 such topics, puts it that "fatigue is the result of a form of seli-poisoning. We are being suffocated and paralysed

by our own waste products." The ; poison must be got rid of, which can only be done by resting the set of muscles most in use, and the brain cells and nerve cells that control them. One way ot not doing this :s to put another set working so hard that more slag accumulates there thin can be comfortably disposed of. "Work hard and play hard," President Roos velt once said, while yielding to one of those temptations to dictatorially generalise which seem to besaet leaders among men. .Nothing could be fuither from the track of wisdom than this, and nothing is nearer to it than "work hard and rest hard"—the one because it is generally necessary and is good exercise for mind and body anyhow, the other because it is the complement of the other and a real enjoyment in itself. Rest, of course, ia a word of various meanings. Different men different rests. Walking is fine rest for some, whose physical equipment it suits, and who are fortunate in being able to take that excellent way of oxygenating themselves. Also, there are cases in which it stimulates thoueht— or is believed to stimulate it, which is about as good—and others in which it serves the still more beneficial purpose of giving relief from thought. "It is primitive and simple." Leslie Stephen testified: "it brings us into contact with Mother Earth, and unsophisticated nature; it is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect, but to turn it out to play for a season." But there are those to whom walking is torture, and among the pathetic • effects of deference to custom high rank is taken by the spectacle of the misguided person who painfully dodders along I under tne delusion that by undergoing this suffering he is improving his ! health when all the time he is inviting the great handicapper fate to

give him more weight to carry in the great race of lif3. While free out of doors air is incomparably the tonic the recupertive virtues cf staying in bed and of "loafing"—of augmenting Nature's restorative, sleep, by resting the faculties and limbs that are on duty during the working day—are not proptirly estimated. The secret seems to be, so far as such a manysided question may be reduced to a principle, that what is enjoyable is good. As in eating, relish brings into work the digestive juices, so in exercise what'gives pleasure is beneficial, because it satisfies the mind's and the body's everlasting demand for change, so that one compartment may have leisure to flush itself while another is working. But the thing essential is rest, and the man is not kind to himself who confounds it with violent exercise.