Jackson Browne
 
You feel the pressure to perform. In fact, you get up in the morning eager to compete as a soldier of today's version of the American work ethic and your belief in meritocracy. It's healthy, unalterable, and required assuming good-enough isn't good enough.
 
Yet something is amiss in our daily forced march a.k.a. our career. 75 percent of Americans report that "If conditions allowed, they would change jobs and change their life." This disquieting data shows an alarming decrease in our relative satisfaction since in 1995, that benchmark scored in the 50 percent range! The operative question may now be, "Do we see stress as a positive condition, or a threat?" Like most things, the answer lies equidistant between the extremes.
 
Stress comes at us in three ways: Conflict, which is all around us and unavoidable, Tension, mainly created when someone tries to meet someone else's expectation, and Strain, the hardest to remedy; a bi-product of subtle, daily grinding through the minefield of our jobs personal lives. It's our contention that "leisure" uses up our weakest index, while "recreation" uses up our strongest. So, perhaps the secret to reducing stress in increments begins with a self-critique on how we treat ourselves in our off moments away from professional bullfighting.
 
Most of us have learned to be "serious" as a rite of passage. The 'S' word helps govern our professional self-conduct, but it also slams us against a locked door. It's common to be too serious, too often. I don't know about you, but I'm fairly confident I won't be looking back in the rear view mirror, "wishing I had been more uptight." Since we all learned how to be serious, it would reason that we could learn how to be less intense. Well, it's a point of view.
 
My Dad took most things very seriously. He was as competitive as anyone I've ever known. A bomber pilot, an athlete, a coach, he would compete to return the pop bottles. Yet he told his players, "We work too hard, not to have fun." He regularly reminded the Moore kids that when things were piling up, we weren't getting the breaks, or that we felt a false sense of importance, we would do well to spend a few minutes in the back yard long after dark looking up at the galaxy's infinite number of stars, exceeding all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world.  It was a certain remedy for the malady of acute seriousness or self-importance. "Cemeteries are filled with serious people," he said.
 
In an ever-challenging time armed with the acceptance that so many things in our life require serious responses, if we're not competitive we face defeat. Even so, there are just too many plates spinning and too many obligations to be met to exist in 100 percent serious-mode all of the time. None of us can cast into the future and we have no clue as to our allotted time-spent-stressing.
 
I once heard Stephen Levine offer this proposition: "If you found out you had but an hour to live and could make just one call, to whom would it be...and what would you say?" Hey, what are we waiting for?