in the first place it is not a great deal of use telling even children , as I have already suggested , not to be silly or to pull themselves together . far better to help them to face whatever it is that is worrying them , to find the original cause and then deal with it ; show it up either for the sham it is - and many fears are based upon completely irrational pre-conceived notions - or to show how we may deal with it so as to remove the power to torment us that it seems to possess . even worse is to laugh . tremendous damage may be done to a child by laughing at what are very real fears . as adults , we know that their fears are groundless , indeed to us they appear laughable , but to a child they are very real . not that I am suggesting that children should be molly-coddled - they must be made to face their fears , to see through them and come out on the other side as victors . to ridicule them only pushes them farther into themselves , so that they become unable to speak about it to anybody and the seeds of any amount of trouble are sown , the harvest of which may still be being reaped at forty or fifty . far better to agree with a child that a particular situation is frightening , and then to face it together until the child can see how unnecessary its fears were . because situations which may contain all the elements of fear can arise suddenly , it is a good idea to condition a child to some extent against it . to keep a child of twelve or thirteen under the impression that nothing nasty ever happens is not merely dishonest , it is unwise . as I shall suggest in a later chapter there are some situations which occur less frequently than they did once , or at least do not now arise until a later period of life , but this is no reason for leaving a child in complete ignorance to the extent of even lying to it when it asks questions . a little more honesty , even if one refrains from going into too many details , would help many a child to make a proper adjustment to life as it grows up . let us look at Jesus . we do not , I think , see there a life without fear . there are several instances where he seemed unable to go on . in Gethsemane he prayed that the cup should pass from him . Jesus shows us the way to face life . to see all the latent frightening possibilities and yet by facing them and knowing God is with us and that , with him , there is nothing that can finally defeat us . more than that , that God has something important to do with our lives and that the nearer we get to him , the stronger we become . &amp;hellip; today a wonderful thought in the dawn was given &amp;hellip; and the thought was this : that a secret plan is hid in my hand ; that my hand is big big , because of the plan that God , who dwells in my hand , knows this secret plan , of the things he will do for the world using my hand . Toyohiko Kagawa . prayer . loving saviour , who experienced all human emotion , and whose sensitive nature knows better than we do , what it is to be really afraid , help us to know that when we face life boldly , many of the shadows are seen to be allies and not enemies and that , come what may , we are never alone when we are with thee . amen . chapter five . tiredness . most people would probably regard tiredness as a purely physical thing . the cure for which is sleep . this is only partly true . many people wake up tired of a morning and no amount of rest seems to make any difference . sleep , to be effective , must be of that child-like quality which comes from innocence . to others , the long hours of the night bring only a disturbed tossing and turning which causes them to wake feeling worse than when they went to bed . we may begin to understand this a little better when we realize that tiredness itself is largely in the mind . very few people , under normal conditions , work themselves to a standstill . the mind tires first and conveys the impression of tiredness to the body . this can be proved by noting the effect of a new stimulus on somebody who feels thoroughly tired . suppose a mother has news late at night that her child is in danger . she will undertake a journey which , an hour before , she would have declared impossible . even more simply , test your own reactions to different situations . there are some which bring on an almost immediate feeling of tiredness - such as when your wife mentions the washing-up - while others , if they refer to something you like doing , bring a veritable surge of energy . many a girl who is too tired to help mum will later jump up with no apparent tiredness at all when her boy friend calls and go for a long walk . nor is she necessarily being deceitful . she really did feel tired until the mind got the necessary injection of a fresh - and an attractive - interest ! tiredness has , therefore , as much to do with our mental state as with our physical exhaustion . a disturbed mind can bring the healthiest body to a sense of fatigue . they wonder why they get no rest at night , even if they do sleep . they drag themselves around and can become a burden to their families and their friends . any mental confusion can cause this and the best way is probably to seek advice . as we are unable to cure our own bodies if the cause of our pain is too deep seated , so we are unable to cure our own minds , if the trouble is a complicated one involving careful and patient treatment . one of the greatest steps forward that has been made this century is the way in which illness of the mind is no longer feared or shunned , and is in fact no differently regarded than physical illness . there is , nevertheless , a great deal of tiredness which comes from no major complication but results from an inability to deal with life , especially under the diverse pattern which is the twentieth century . in the days when most people were born , lived and died within the boundaries of the village , it was not difficult for anybody to live a day at a time . even those who held a high and responsible office lived in far greater simplicity than their successors . when news from the continent took days , from America weeks , from the far east , months , even a Prime Minister could go to sleep in blissful ignorance of what might be happening at the other end of England , whereas today , everybody , let alone the Prime Minister , knows of happenings the other side of the world , within minutes of their taking place . in other ways , too , life for the ordinary individual has become so complex that it taxes the mind . two hundred years ago , men lived and worked in one place , their lives were of one piece . now a man may live twenty , thirty even sixty miles from his work . the only connexion is the pipeline of the railway on which they travel day by day . in many cases , their homes know little of their place of work and their associates at the office or works wonder what they are possibly like in the surroundings of their homes . it is easy , desperately easy , to lead a double life without ever deliberately planning to do so or in fact being conscious of what is going on . it is easier to live life in compartments but over the years it builds up , and to do so inevitably builds up tensions which need to be handled correctly . can we then frame some rules which may enable us to live life as fully as possible , without having our energy sapped by unnecessary weariness . ( a ) . makes for a decrease in tiredness . we have a saying my head will never save my feet . time after time we forget something and have to go back upstairs or down to the shops . if we ever stopped to consider how much energy - and time - we lose this way in the course of a day we would be staggered . some of it is inevitable , and we do not want to become too pernickety . nevertheless , we could all probably be a little more orderly for we so frequently just muddle through . the housewife would find life far less tiring if she made a list , followed a routine of work rather than getting from one thing to the next . the business man would find that he reached the end of the day with far less strain if he was a little more systematic . to drift aimlessly along is more wearying than anything else . if we would only sit down and write out all the necessary jobs waiting to be done and then work quietly through them , we would find life considerably less exhausting - and in the end we would do more . there may be some who will argue that routine destroys the soul . it is so easy , they say , to get into a rut . save us from the school curriculum and even worse the school system whereby for meals everybody knows beforehand exactly what , on any given day of the week , they are going to have . if - such a critic may say - you are calling us to adventure , do not strangle us before we start by putting us into a strait-jacket called order . I am more than conscious of this . how anybody can go through the same routine day in and day out for forty years I find difficult to understand . a lot of it is inevitable so that industry and commerce may be kept going - though if ever it becomes possible to work out a system of staggered hours it may do an immense amount of good over and above relieving the pressure on over-crowded trains . as it is , with so much of our life already in a predetermined groove , I would hardly like to add further to the dullness which it engenders . but I am not arguing for this . I know how much of a drag it can be and I was interested some little while ago to hear of a school who tried a six-day timetable . they only worked , of course , a five-day week so that in the first week Monday to Friday were days one to five of the timetable , the following Monday was day six and Tuesday started day one again and so on . by this means they avoided each week being the same with a pupil knowing exactly what the subject would be on Friday afternoon at 3 p.m . it was a little complicated to work , of course , and there had to be a big notice in the entrance saying which day of the timetable it was - but it added immensely to the interest and kept everybody on their toes . to have order does not mean getting into a dull routine . I have great sympathy with the young wife who does not always want to do the washing on a Monday . I would not want to either , but if she wants to get through the day without becoming exhausted , she will be well advised to sit down quietly and make a list of everything she has got to do , note the order in which they can most conveniently be done ( or must be done because of other predetermined factors - you must , for example , do your shopping on the morning of the early closing day ) . she will , in fact , be surprised at what peace of mind ensues . ( b ) . concentrate on one thing at a time . a list or a plan enables us to put all our energies into the particular matter on hand . 