As to what form of manual work people take up their individual tastes will decide, just as much as in the kind of reading they indulge in. If they have a faculty for art, they can take up painting or music. And when I say music, I mean practising it properly, not simply sitting down to the piano to improvise or wander from piece to piece. It is the steady practice which does the brain good.
Or they may prefer carpentry or wood carving, or preparing microscopic slides, than which there is no more absorbing hobby. There are scores of others, too, equally interesting.
Nothing, however trivial, is beneath our notice, if it will in any way mitigate this deadly habit of worrying, which has such a detrimental influence on the nervous system, and so often is responsible both for the starting-point and the climax of a breakdown.
The strength of a chain lies in its weakest link, and the measure of man’s strength is that of the weak point in his constitution. He may have the frame and muscle of a Sandow, but if he has a faulty valve in his heart, it is by that, and not by his muscular development, that his strength must be gauged. Even supposing that every organ in his body is sound, and he is possessed of great powers of endurance, he cannot be called strong if he is impairing his digestion by careless habits of eating and drinking, or endangering his nervous system by habitually keeping late hours and burning the candle at both ends, or laying up gout in store for himself by gourmandising or want of exercise.
No matter whether the weak spot be in the man’s own system or in his mode of life, Nature will find it out as surely as the arrow found the heel of Achilles. It is on his weak points that he must stand or fall; it is in these that the strain will manifest itself, in other words, that the breakdown will appear.
The aim of this book has been to prevent matters ever reaching this stage, to arrest them at the outset. No sign, of all those I have indicated as pointing towards a breakdown, should be neglected. The time to take heed is when any man or woman finds that their powers of work are failing them, their nerves easily upset, or their minds assailed by an unreasonable dread of the future, or that in one or other of various ways they are not the people they were. It is better to slow down at the first danger signal than to run past one after another until we are pulled up with a crash.
