Issue 387
Have you noticed how you can learn from anyone if you listen? When I meet someone new and I tell them I work in stress management, their first response is very revealing. I was recently in a conversation with a lady from Albania, who talked to me about the stress levels in her country (while she was cutting my toe nails – now banish that image!). She had lived in the US for a number of years and was observing that stress levels were much higher in the US than in her homeland.
This seemed to me to have an element of the counterintuitive about it; Albania is a poor country with high unemployment; it has struggled with matters of government and freedom; opportunities for life enhancement are hard to come by. So why would she assess her homeland to be less stressed? She explained to me that there is a cafe culture; rather than sit at home with an Xbox, a flat screen TV or a surround sound home cinema, Albanians go out and sit together over a coffee.
“We are prepared,” she explained, “to live in small apartments and not sell our souls in order to gain material wealth.”
She argued that this is both out of necessity – other opportunities simply don’t exist – but also out of choice. Americans (and British), she observed, work so hard for so long in order to service a particular lifestyle;- if they were prepared to live with less, they would be more content, was her point as she clipped another part of my foot.
There is an ugly word for wanting more than we need; it is not good, as the ‘Wall Street’ character, Gordon Gekko, asserted. It seems to be a potential thief of the present and its name is greed.
He is an illustration for you:
A fisherman is lying on a beach by his boat.
A young American foreign exchange dealer on vacation begins to engage
him in a conversation.
“How come you are not fishing?”
“I am done for the day.”
“Why don’t you grow your business?”
“How do you mean?”
“If you had two boats instead of one, you could make twice the money.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you would be wealthier and have more choices.”
“What kind of choices?”
“You could employ more people to make you more money and build a large
fishing fleet.”
“What would I do with all this money?”
“Well you could take vacations like me and have freedom to indulge yourself.”
“In what way?”
“Well you could just chill and relax and sunbathe.”
“That’s what I am doing right now!”
Paul said he had learnt the secret of contentment. Maybe learning that secret
would drive out the greed and drive down the stress.
It’s a thought.
Philippians 4:11-13
11 I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. 12 I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. 13 I can do all this through him who gives me strength
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Work well
Geoff Shattock
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