An article published in the Osteopathic Magazine 1925 is still relevant today.
Too little attention has been paid to the necessity of rest as a conserver of force, as a means of maintaining health and consequently happiness: too little has been said on the subject of vacations. The truth of this is impressed upon us daily by the army of tired faces: faces stamped with tension and anxiety. Hurry and worry are more fatal than disease.
The true physician teaches men, women and children how to combine activity with rest, how to conserve energy while spending it. He teaches that we are foolishly the slaves of our possessions, and that besides a definite aim in life we should have a hobby which we may ride for freedom, relaxation, and possibly other useful ends.
There would be fewer chronic invalids, fewer cases of melancholia and neurasthenia if people as a whole took more vacations and fewer hypothetical tonics. Real tonics are drawn form the vast storehouses of Nature – from sunshine, pure air, exercise, healthful food and sleep.
Ella Adelia Fletcher has expressed so beautifully the influence of Nature upon our imagination and says in her book, The Philosophy of Rest:
“Get away into the woods where the trees will talk to you, or down on the sands by the seashore where every incoming wave will whisper messages of the throbbing vitality of which you are a part. A delicious sense of freedom, an intoxicating calm will steal over you, wooing your soul to expand.
You are not dual, your soul is the only one there is! This intimate companionship with self thus enjoyed may enable you to discover hitherto unsuspected talents. Every moment of this intimacy with yourself is fraught with deepest significance, and will return to you a hundredfold treasure, in ways you want not of health, strength, and enlarged ability.
What has the world been made so beautiful for, if not to minister to some need of man? To lift him out of his petty environment – into the secrets of the everlasting hills.”