Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [85]
The die was cast when my boss (you’ll remember the Cobra . . . imagine now his views on the efficacy of a stress management afternoon) said, “Let’s go golfing.” Well, I reasoned, if your boss tells you to blow off a session, that’s almost like a direct order. Besides, everyone knows that physical activity is stress relieving. All sorts of happy little endorphins flowing around like little Tranquillity bumper cars. Thus, my boss, me, and four other like-minded colleagues went golfing. What could be more stress relieving than the frustration of trying to knock a tiny round ball into an equally small hole across acres of real estate? As Robin Williams says, there’s a reason they call a shot a stroke.
I’d be lying if I said we didn’t have a good time. It might make for a better story if we got rained on, or someone wrapped a club around a tree. That, however, is not what happened. We might not have played very well, but we enjoyed a stress-relieving afternoon. As we returned to the conference facilities, it was with some confidence that we’d find a group of coworkers who would be required to admit the error of their ways and the brilliance of ours.
That’s not what we found.
When we returned, to my surprise, my colleagues were effusive about the presentation. Great stuff, they said, best presentation of the meeting. To add some further context, I should point out that most of these people would, by experience or nature, have a similar view of the world as the Cobra and I. These are a group of people to whom an admission of anxiety is tantamount to an admission of weakness. We might bemoan the stressors in the system but never its effect on our own psyches. These are prosecutors, the lone wolves of the justice system, guardians of the public safety. Now they were talking like groupies at a Zamfir concert.
What had happened in the few hours that we had abandoned them? What body snatchers had invaded and replaced my battle-hardened friends with sensitive, New Age wimps?
So what was the big deal? I asked. One replied that they appreciated the Life Stress Chart, a stress value scorecard giving values to life’s various events and circumstances. “I had no idea I had so many stressful things going on in my life,” she added. Another liked a handout called “The Wear and Tear Syndrome of Stress.”6 The handout linked stressors to stress and then on to disease. “I’ve got to make some changes,” my friend said. I thought I heard a note of desperation in his voice.
I thought about my week of Tranquillity. I had let Ben down. My own general sense of ease with the ebb and flow of life was easily replicated, I reasoned. People who complained about how stressful life is were just whiners. As I sat and listened to my peers, people who are anything but whiners, unburden themselves about how a two-hour course had shed a ray of light on their own battles with stress, I was overcome with a sense of guilt. How could I have been so callous?
It struck me, as I listened, that they weren’t suggesting that there were great mountains of dismay weighing down on them. Rather, what they described sounded a little like being buried in sand on a beach. A few scoops of sand were just an irritant; a couple of buckets full, an uncomfortable weight but no more. Pile on enough sand, however, and the ability to move, freedom itself, was restricted.
Like sand at the beach, however, they also revealed that a little shift, some wiggling, and enough effort could loosen the sand. The more sand that was cast off, the less its hold on them. “I loved the strategies he gave us for coping with stress.” This was the constant among the group. I decided I had better look at the materials they had been given.
As I examined the resources provided, I was struck with the simplicity of the solution for stress management that was offered. Tiny shifts, little movements, and the weight of the sand was lessened. And now, in the fullness of time, and following my examination of my own family members, the pattern was clear. Simplicity