Evidence of this same fact appears in our feelings on different days.
How often does a man get up from his breakfast-table after a long
night's rest, when he should be feeling fresh and invigorated, and say
to himself, "I don't feel like working today." And it may take him
until afternoon to get into his workaday stride, if, indeed, he
reaches it at all.

[Sidenote: _How to Strike One's Stride_]

You cannot yourself be immune from the feeling on certain days that
you are not at your best. Somehow or other, your wits seem befogged.
You hesitate to undertake important interviews. Your interest lags.
And though crises arise in your business, you feel weighted down and
unable to meet them with that shrewd discernment and decisiveness of
action of which you know yourself capable.

But you realize, in your inmost self, that _if you continue to exert
the will and persistently hold yourself to the business in hand,
sooner or later you will warm to the work, enthusiasm will come, the
clouds will be dispelled, the husks will fly. Yet you have had no
rest; on the contrary, you have, by continued conscious effort,
consumed more and more of your vital energy_.

[Sidenote: _The Spur of Desire_]

Obviously it was not rest that you needed.

What you required was the impulse of some _strong desire_ that should
carry you over the threshold of that first inertia into the wide field