ACTIVITY AND HEALTH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 792, 24 September 1954, Page 25

ACTIVITY AND HEALTH

HAT annoying old counter-irritant to '" mental atrophy, Bernard Shaw, once said: "Hell is complete leisure for ever and ever." It seems to be part of our inherited load of original sin that all human beings are born lazy. We have an impulse to inertia which, in order to accomplish anything, must be overcome. Mrs. Hamilton Grieve, housewife, teacher in a North Island country school and author, looks at the problem from a practical point of view in a series of talks called Let’s Consider, to be heard from 4ZB’s Women’s Hour, starting on September 28, and from 22ZB, starting October 12. People must eat, she says, and to satisfy that essential need most people have to work. They belong to the working classes. The housewife has to work twice over so that she and her family may eat, but it is rather odd that, on the average, women live longer than men. Could it be due to the fact that a woman never really retires, for work has never killed anybody unless they are rendered physically unfit for it by incarceration in a concentration camp or some similar mischance. The cure for a nervous breakdown is not complete rest, but supervised activity and the best way to come to terms with our working existence is simply to learn to like what we have to do. So, in plain and down-to-earth fashion Mrs, Grieve goes on to consider our

children’s attitude to work, the things we can give our children, discipline, and the things we suggest to our children.