Dali, The Persistence of Memory
Stress
can, if we are not careful, be our undoing. Modern stress, unlike that
faced by prehistoric people, is often chronic (recurring, or never
going away) and 'unmanageable' (there is no obvious, immediate action
we can take to respond to it and hence discharge it). It served its
purpose when we needed adrenaline to flee or fight predators. But now,
it just makes us physically and mentally ill -- our bodies just have
not adapted to cope with 'civilized' stress.
It has been a momentous few weeks for me. I
started my new position. I completed and submitted my book manuscript.
And I have grappled with a whole series of small problems -- I cut a
corner too tight in an underground garage and badly scraped the side of
my car, the swimming pool sprung a leak, we had a grass fire caused by
a faulty circuit breaker, someone accidentally damaged our side gate.
The combination of all these things in rapid succession would have been
too much for 'the old me' to handle. Sudden dramatic change, time
pressure, and unwelcome surprises are all major stressers in our lives.
How does resilience help us cope with all three of these sources of stress?
- Sudden Dramatic Change: If it's not an
unwelcome change (if it is, see point 3) sudden changes should be
joyous. A new member of the community, a new love, a new career --
these are things to cherish, to celebrate, not to get stressed over. We
should take our cue from what happens when we fall in love: Time stops,
goes away. We are there in the moment, and it lasts almost forever. So
the change over this infinite time is so gradual it is no noticeable
change at all. Love change, embrace it, slow it down, make it last, and
the stress disappears.
- Time Pressure: Time pressures are, like time itself, illusory,
self-imposed. You either have sufficient time to do something or you
don't. Worrying
about whether you have enough
time changes nothing. You can reduce the worry by not creating
expectations (in others or in yourself), expectations that you have
enough time to do something when you don't. This is the agony of the
procrastinator -- the tendency to put things off until there is almost,
or perhaps, not enough time to do them. This is human nature (we do
what we must, when we must, and not before; we are preoccupied our
whole lives with the needs of the moment). But in the modern world it
is unhealthy. You'll
get it done or you won't. So put away the stopwatch, just do it, and
enjoy every moment of it. I ended up rewriting a lot more of my book
than I expected, and adding a lot more. For three weekends I worked
twelve hour days, and loved every second of it. I didn't care about the
deadline, as close as it was. So there was no stress. The work took as
long as it took, as long it had to take.
- Unwelcome Surprises:
This is the toughest of the three stresses, the one that still gets to
me -- sometimes. The flood and the fire stressed me briefly, because
they could have been disastrous, if they'd spread to the house, the
wetlands, or the neighbours'. You can tell yourself rationally that
it's absurd to get stressed about what could have been,
that it's a fiction, and so not worth worrying about or getting angry
about, but it takes practice to do this. The car accident didn't stress
me much at all (although I was annoyed at myself, because I wasn't paying attention).
And the fence damage only annoyed me because the guy who did it didn't
admit it right away -- I had to approach him. We can get better at
handling the stress reaction to these things, I think, with practice
putting it behind us, adapting it it, letting it bounce off us, flow
through us. But what if it's a truly horrific surprise -- the loss of a
loved one, the loss of a job, a bankruptcy or an involuntary move? Can
we 'learn' to let such crises flow through us as well, without remorse
for what we might have done differently, for the fiction of what could have been? I'm not so sure.
I've
also been fortunate not to have faced a fourth source of stress -- a
longer-term adversity, such as having to look after a loved one (or
worse, someone I don't love), or putting up with constant pain or
disfigurement or a life-altering disability. The people I know who face
such stresses have told me they don't feel courageous or like martyrs:
What seems to us to be courage, they say, is simply not having any
other choice -- we do what we must. Nevertheless, to me, this would be
a form of imprisonment, and, like all of nature's creatures,
imprisonment is what we fear most, the form of stress that has no
resolution, no relief, no way of coping through resilience.
Those
who are imprisoned, regardless of whether I think, or anyone thinks,
that imprisonment is real or self-inflicted, are the unhappiest people,
I think, in the world. It is no wonder they seek escape, solace,
through drugs or religion or suicide.
So now whenever I
experience one of the three transient stresses above I imagine being
imprisoned -- with no escape, no way of coping by slowing time down or
just doing things in the moment or rationalizing that 'what could have
been' is absurd to be unhappy about -- and it's the gratefulness I feel
at realizing that my stressful situation will soon pass, vanish
backwards into the fiction, the exhaust of the past that is
disconnected from Now, that discharges my stress most quickly and
powerfully.
But that realization and that gratefulness also
resurfaces my unbearable grief for Gaia, because I am, we all are
(those of us who feel it, anyway) connected
with all-life-on-Earth, and hence with every creature who is
imprisoned, who is suffering not just for a brief moment but all the
time of their life without escape.
It is a paradox that that
realization fills me, at once, with such sadness, and yet strengthens
the growing joy and resolve that fills my life, a joy I never felt when
I was disconnected. So we cope with transient stresses through
resilience that comes from practice, from self-awareness and
gratefulness and connection, but the by-product of all those things is
grief for those whose stresses are not transient, but enduring and
unrelieved, and that grief is, in a way, another source of stress, not
personal or intense but sympathetic, chronic, a part of us all until
the end of the world.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
