Stressed or Blessed

It used to be called “worry” or “anxiety.” Now, I gather, the fashionable term is “stress” – and I seem to have lately been gathering plenty of it. But what is there really in life worth having such feelings about?

It’s all in the mind, I think. That’s what keeps psychiatrists in business. Those professional “head-shrinkers” once based their treatment on having a dialogue with the patient. Now it’s more a matter of giving us pills to pop.

In my case, I’ve had both kinds of “care.” But neither palaver nor pills have given me a good answer to the question of what life is about. One thing at least is certain – it’s something that comes and goes – and we come and go with it. That in itself is a ridiculous situation. Some people who seem to have found the answer will tell you it’s simply a matter of having a positive attitude – considering yourself too blessed to be stressed. The good things in life make it all worthwhile, they will say. There’s not much along these lines that I haven’t heard or thought about. As a professional thinker, I’ve published 10,000 separate pieces of my mind. Here are a few of the best on the current topic:

I try to avoid stressful activities – that’s why I have so much free time.

Please don’t tell me to relax – it’s only my tension that’s holding me together.

It’s not easy – my Counsellor says I need more challenge – my Doctor says I need less stress.

But what really are the best things in life? One idea we can start with is that they are notoriously free. For cat-lovers, my own take on this was that:

“The best things in life are furry.”

But at this point, I am supposed to list things like food, sex, friendship, and sunshine. It could be a long and impressive list. But at the bottom, you would have to stop, because of a little thing called Death, which (depending, of course, on how you look at it) can seem to make the whole thing meaningless. We have words to soften it, like “Passing away,” or “Kicking the bucket,” and whole institutions to deal with it, which generally come under the heading of “religions” – although some such belief systems have more to offer than others, at least when it comes to an “afterlife,” or a “next world.” Judaism, for example, has very little to say about it, compared with Christianity, whose actual founder is believed to have been resurrected.

But the really positive thinkers regard this life, that we already know, as Heaven, and consider its less pleasant aspects as illusory, or at best, hardly worth dwelling on. My own feeling is that this world may indeed be all we will ever know of both Heaven and Hell. It took great thinker-poets like Dante and Milton to conceive, in detail, while still inhabiting this Earth, the nature of those other worlds.

When you are in great pain, Heaven would simply be no more pain. Hell would be for it to never stop – or, even worse, to have it keep stopping and starting again. I personally had a bad “sciatic” pain, which seemed to originate in my lower back, and extend down one leg. I was advised to get steroid injections, which I did twice, without any relief. But a third time has now actually worked for several months. Is this Heaven? Hardly. When you get rid of one trouble, it enables you to give more attention to all the others. I suppose being thankful is a matter of seeing the glass as half full, rather than half empty.

In one way, the word “stress” reminds me of my father. He didn’t know much about architecture, but had somewhere picked up one idea. Whenever a conversation got onto that subject, he would always indicate dismissively that he knew it was all about “stresses and strains.” Of course, that kind of stress relates to the forces acting on some material object, like a girder or beam. And the big question is always, how much can it stand before it reaches a breaking point?

That also may apply to our minds and their capacity to withstand stress. One psychiatric term with which you may be familiar is “nervous breakdown.” I had one in my early twenties, and would happily tell you about it here in great detail, except that, like life, this article had to end.