Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [127]
I set out on this journey like a baby bird hatching from its egg; ever since I have been walking in freedom. Every man should get to know himself and experience life in all its forms. I could have gone on sleeping soundly in my bed, and found work in my town, because a job was ready for me, but I decided to sleep with the poor, because one must suffer to become a man. One does not get to be a man by getting married, by having sex: to be a man means to be responsible, to know when it is time to speak, to know what has to be said, to know when one must stay silent.
Reyad spoke at much greater length, and all his remarks were consistent with the unwavering purpose of his spiritual quest. Like the disheveled prophets who roamed the deserts in search of enlightenment two thousand years ago, this traveler has distilled everyday life into a goal of hallucinatory clarity: to control his consciousness in order to establish a connection between his self and God. What were the causes that led him to give up the “good things in life” and pursue such a chimera? Was he born with a hormonal imbalance? Did his parents traumatize him? These questions, which are the ones that usually interest psychologists, shall not concern us here. The point is not to explain what accounts for Reyad’s strangeness, but to recognize that, given the fact he is who he is, Reyad has transformed living conditions most people would find unbearable into a meaningful, enjoyable existence. And that is more than many people living in comfort and luxury can claim.
COPING WITH STRESS
“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” remarked Samuel Johnson, in a saying whose truth applies to the cases just presented. A major catastrophe that frustrates a central goal of life will either destroy the self, forcing a person to use all his psychic energy to erect a barrier around remaining goals, defending them against further onslaughts of fate; or it will provide a new, more clear, and more urgent goal: to overcome the challenges created by the defeat. If the second road is taken, the tragedy is not necessarily a detriment to the quality of life. Indeed, as in the cases of Lucio, Paolo, and innumerable others like them, what objectively seems a devastating event may come to enrich the victims’ lives in new and unexpected ways. Even the loss of one of the most basic human faculties, like that of sight, does not mean that a person’s consciousness need become impoverished; the opposite is often what happens. But what makes the difference? How does it come about that the same blow will destroy one person, while another will transform it into inner order?
Psychologists usually study the answers to such questions under the heading of coping with stress. It is obvious that certain events cause more psychological strain than others: for example, the death of a spouse is several orders of magnitude more stressful than taking out a mortgage on a house, which in turn causes more strain than being given a traffic ticket. But it is also clear that the same stressful event might make one person utterly miserable, while another will bite the bullet and make the best of it. This difference in how a person responds to stressful events has been called “coping ability” or “coping style.”
In trying to sort out what accounts for a person’s ability to cope with stress, it is useful to distinguish three different kinds of resources. The first is the external support available, and especially the network of social supports. A major illness, for instance, will be mitigated to a certain extent if one has good insurance and a loving family. The second bulwark against stress includes a person’s psychological resources, such as intelligence, education, and relevant personality factors. Moving to