The Joy of Stress

Our tragedy is not that we suffer, but what we miss when we suffer. Rejoice, then, when a negative feeling has been aroused in you, because if you follow it up, it will lead you closer to liberation.
Anthony De Mello

Can you remember the first time that stress entered your life as a force to be reckoned with? How far back in your history do you have to go to find the time when stress did not seem to be your constant companion? Do you find a smile creeping across your lips as you think back to the carefree days of your childhood?

During those early days, stress was something that erupted like a volcano whenever you loaded up your diaper and there was no one around to change it, or your prized blankie was reduced to its final thread. The outpouring was great, it was loud, and then it was over. You moved on. More to the point, you did not hang on to the stress. It would be back, surely, but your concern at the moment was the little teddy bear that made a funny squeaky sound when you pressed his tummy—ah, childhood.

When we grow up we have a very different relationship with stress. It is very heady in nature and deadly serious. We brood over our stress. We seek to understand it, manage it and avoid it. All of this attention, rather than solving anything, prevents stress from moving on as in those early days. We have grown out of our crib cages only to be surrounded by prison walls of experience, and we have built them high and built them strong. As children, it was our ignorance that kept us free, as adults it is our “wisdom” that locks the prison door.

Stress is the mental friction that results when the world as it is rubs up against the world that we think should be. In and of itself, it is simply energy and can be very beneficial; think of rubbing your hands together on a cold winter’s day. However, left unchecked and surrounded by the right fuel there is the potential to create a more destructive force; think of rubbing two sticks together over a pile of gasoline soaked rags. No matter what we tell ourselves, the difference between the two is not a matter of fate or fortune. The fault, as Shakespeare pointed out, “lies not in our stars but in ourselves.” Once we fully appreciate this point we can see that the solution also lies in ourselves. Once we become again as little children and take the world for what it is and not what we wish it to be, we will find that stress moves on and so can we, minus the whole dirty diaper thing.

The joy of stress comes from experiencing ourselves as we were before the thought monster ate us whole. It comes from allowing tension to be in our life without resistance. Without the fight or blame we become the perfectly tuned guitar string for which tension is essential and necessary. Once we face the fact that our attempts to avoid stress are simply games of hide and seek with the self, we will be able to return to a time when all we had to do to put an end to searching was call “olly olly oxen free.”