Are We Building Stress into Our Lives?

We certainly live in a fast-paced society. Most people would probably agree that the speed of today’s “living” has something to do with the stresses most of us experience in our working lives and too often bring home with us.

Speed, it seems, is relative to itself. Letters carried over ground and water gave way to airmail. When the fax machine was introduced, days became minutes. Dedicated fax machines are now mostly scans attached to e-mails, and minutes have become seconds. Apparently not fast enough, e-mails have morphed into instant messages and iChats. 

I now spend hours daily answering e-mails. Of course, it’s true that I spend less time on the phone and I’m handling a greater volume of traffic. But this raises the question, where are we heading at such ever-increasing speed?

The Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland explains to Alice, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Are we losing something in the transaction of exchanging our present for a future toward which we need to race faster and faster?

One of the great things about taking a vacation in new surroundings and seeing the sights is that we focus on where we are. It’s most often fun, and we come back possibly tired but certainly refreshed. But is it smart to race through fifty weeks in order to enjoy ourselves for the other two? Can we have some revitalization in our daily lives?

To answer this question, my wife and I decided to give the past and future a temporary rest and focus on our present environment. While we were driving, we enjoyed the fall foliage and noticed some trees with unique pods we hadn’t seen before. It was some natural beauty we responded to. Later, we were cooking dinner and saw that the olive oil drizzled in the pan came out looking like a Chinese character. These little observations illustrate a simple point: there are things to see if you’re looking.

I wonder what other beauty and magic our pre-mall-age children see that we are speeding by? Is our frenetic race toward ill-defined fulfillment in a nebulous future causing us to miss the real show?

What do you think? Email me at [email protected].

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