Readings on STRESS

[Baashi]

[stress]

 

Fidgety People

 

Posted on Monday, December 15, 2003. “Fidgety people are rarely well. They have generally ‘a headache,’ or ‘spasms,’ or ‘nerves,’ or something of that sort; they can not be comfortable in their way, without trouble.†Originally from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 2, iss. 11, April 1851.

 

There are people whom one occasionally meets with in the world, who are in a state of perpetual fidget and pucker. Every thing goes wrong with them. They are always in trouble. Now, it is the weather which is too hot; or at another time, too cold. The dust blows into their eyes, or there is “that horrid rain,†or “that broiling sun,†or “that Scotch mist.†They are as ill to please about the weather as a farmer; it is never to their liking, and never will be. They “never saw such a summer,†“not a day's fine weather,†and they go back to antiquity for comfort—“it was not so in our younger days.â€

 

Fidgety people are rarely well. They have generally “a headache,†or “spasms,†or “nerves,†or something of that sort; they can not be comfortable in their way, without trouble. Most of their friends are ill; this one has the gout “so bad;†another has the rheumatics; a third is threatened with consumption; and there is scarcely a family of their acquaintance whose children have not got measles, hooping-cough, scarlet fever, or some other of the thousand ills which infantine flesh is heir to. They are curiously solicitous about the health of every body; this one is exhorted “not to drink too much cold water,†another “not to sit in the draught,†a third is advised to “wear flannels;†and they have great doctors at their fingers' ends whom they can quote in their support. They have read Buchan and Culpepper[1], and fed their fidgets upon their descriptions of diseases of all sorts. They offer to furnish recipes for pills, draughts, and liniments; and if you would believe them, your life depends on taking their advice gratis forthwith.

 

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