I wonder a lot these days how the stress of our ever-changing world is affecting people, I see around me that life goes on, yet beneath the surface I wonder if we aren’t bubbling, sometimes ready to boil over.
The stress of the work-a-day world can sneak up on me. When I’m least expecting it, thinking I’m OK, there is suddenly an outburst of one kind or another and I say or do absurd, stupid things.
Then I pause, and look around. The wreckage in my path is unmistakable. I have hurt someone’s feelings, perhaps, and I am dumbfounded by my own temporary insanity.
The world I see through the television – I think of Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass" - is upside down. People are losing jobs, politicians talk of dire times and the prospect for the future, for now, looks grim.
Yet the world I see in real time, well it looks more sane and perhaps that is hope, the one thing that is keeping the visible signs of stress beneath the surface.
Last weekend, as I stood amid a crowd of kids and their parents at the local Flaming Speedway event, I scanned the area. Children ran in circles, screaming in delight before the event. Parents gathered in small groups, talking about whatever it was they talked about.
As the race began, cars speedily rolled down the track and boys and girls cheered on their favorites, these cars being transformed with great care into speed racers along with there drivers.
The whole thing was a normal event, with no undercurrents of stress that surely occupied some space in the mind of every adult.
In other words, life goes on and we have to live it, and that day people were living it.
When my great grandmother was alive, I asked her about her experiences during the Great Depression. I wanted to hear a firsthand account of what it was like during the days when people seemingly had nothing and the stress of a broken economy – perhaps an understatement – was leaving people seemingly hopeless.
Miss Pearl, as I called her, was in her 20s during the height of that period. She was already a mother and a wife, and she was not fazed by the hard times, she told me.
She and her husband were farmers. Oh, she said, coffee, flour and sugar were hard to come by, but they had what they needed and understood how to take care of themselves, and their children.
It was different time, to be sure. But what struck me about her casual response was that she had not expressed that there was stress in the way they lived. Things, she told me, were fairly simple back then and there was no need to worry.
“We knew things would work out in the end,” she said
And that’s what I forget when I get stressed by the world. Things have a way of working out, especially if I’m willing to do that work.
"Remember life will go on, and things will get better if you keep hope."
*Credit for some of the information in this post goes to DailyAdventures.com, written by Robert Kelly-Gross. Tuesday, April 6, 2004*
