Do We Hurry Too Much?

1914

Some learned doctors tell us periodically that we all eat too much meat nowadays considering how sedentary are the lives we lead; others affirm that no diseases would be known were we to live — or to exist — on morsels of nearly raw meat, washed down, by copious draughts of hot water.

There are those who commend cheese, milk, nuts and greens. There are others who find peace in chewing whatever it is they eat for hours and hours. Smoking is the alleged destruction of some; others find in it their salvation. Alcohol embalms one section of humanity unto extreme old age, preserving them; another section is brought to horrid death by means of alcohol.

We know these divergences in medical opinion and conceive that there can be no reconciliation between them, and that therefore the one thing to do is to toss up and follow a single course, which, on the whole, had better be the thing you best like. If you enjoy nuts and proteid, why, enjoy them.

A General Opinion

Meanwhile, there is, we find, one point upon which pretty nearly all our experts are agreed. It is that, whatever we eat, we all hurry too much.

A nerve specialist at an instructive conference has recently renewed the accusation. He has repeated it for the ten thousandth time. He has run two words together to name the malady of it; he has called us all "can't-waiters," because of our fever to get on to the next thing in the day's work.

How is it that we suffer from an inability to believe a thing that is too often repeated?

The more we hear a certain truth, somehow, the less true it is apt to become for us. Now, do we, indeed, hurry so much? Are we most of us "can't-waiters"?

Taking It Easy

Observe. Follow, with feet anxious to progress, the throng of moving creatures on some fine spring day when, as the poet tells us, the feet are eager to wander. Let us get on quickly. We have much to get through.

How is this? Nobody else, apparently, is in a similar case. They all move slowly. They stop. They stop and gaze at anything there is to gaze at. They stop in the middle of the pavement. They are in no hurry. They have the day before them — the day to talk in, to dream in, to gaze open-mouthed in, to moon about in the subways and in the trains and in the streets, supposed to be "busy."

Try, if you really are in a hurry, to get past them. You cannot. Where all (apparently) have leisure, what are one or two with something to do? A minority of "can't-waiters" are nothing to the vast majority of those who apparently have nothing to do. The neologism is ugly enough. There seem to be thousands who are nowadays in no hurry to get anywhere, who destroy the nerves of the "can't-waiters" far more successfully than the mere fact of not waiting does for the insignificant few.