Third—­We must remember that we need not sew in a badly cramped position.  Of course the, exercises will help us out of the habitually cramped attitude, but we cannot expect them to help us so much unless we make an effort while sewing to be as little cramped as possible.

The exercises give us a new standard of erectness, and that new standard will make us sensitive to the wrong attitude.

We will constantly notice when our chests get cramped and settled down on our stomachs and by expanding them and lifting them, even as we sew, the healthy attitude will get to be second nature.

Fourth—­We must sew with our hands and our arms, not with our spines, the backs of our necks, or our legs.  The unnecessary strain she puts into her sewing makes a woman more tired than anything else.  To avoid this she must get sensitive to the strain, and every time she perceives it drop it; consciously, with a decided use of her will, until she has established the habit of working without strain.  The gentle raising of the head to the erect position after the breathing exercise will let out a great deal of strain, and so make us more sensitive to its return when we begin to sew, and the more sensitive we get to it the sooner we can drop it.

I think I hear a woman say, “I have neither the time nor the strength to attend to all this.”  My answer is, such exercise will save time and strength in the end.

CHAPTER XXIII

Do not Hurry

HOW can any one do anything well while in a constant state of rush?  How can any one see anything clearly while in a constant state of rush?  How can any one expect to keep healthy and strong while in a constant state of rush?

But most of my readers may say, “I am not in a constant state of rush—­I only hurry now and then when I need to hurry.”

The answer to that is “Prove it, prove it.”  Study yourself a little, and see whether you find yourself chronically in a hurry or not.

If you will observe yourself carefully with a desire to find the hurry tendency, and to find it thoroughly, in order to eliminate it, you will be surprised to see how much of it there is in you.

The trouble is that all our standards are low, and to raise our standards we must drop that which interferes with the most wholesome way of living.

As we get rid of all the grosser forms of hurry we find in ourselves other hurry habits that are finer and more subtle, and gradually our standards of quiet, deliberate ways get higher; we become more sensitive to hurry, and a hurried way of doing things grows more and more disagreeable to us.

Watch the women coming out of a factory in the dinner hour or at six o’clock.  They are almost tumbling over each other in their hurry to get away.  They are putting on their jackets, pushing in their hatpins, and running along as if their dinner were running away from them.