Stay Alive All Your Life by Norman Vincent Peale

Author:Norman Vincent Peale
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Touchstone

CHAPTER IX

WHY BE TENSE? HOW TO ADJUST TO STRESS

“If you are to maintain power to meet your responsibilities and to continue effectively over the long pull, you must give as much consideration to that delicate, yet powerful, mechanism known as your human personality as engineers give to their engines. You can purchase another engine, but that ‘engine’ known as yourself cannot be reproduced if it fails, and stress is a major cause of that failure.”

TENSION IS a number one problem today. We have never had a national patron saint, officially, in America, but apparently we do have one in a practical sense. The patron saint of the British is St. George; of the Irish, St. Patrick. The patron saint of Americans must be St. Vitus. We are a nervous, high-strung, tense generation of people.

Yes, America is full of tension and yet, actually, it isn’t America that is tense, for the land is just the same as it has always been: wide, sweeping prairies; huge mountains, lifting their peaks against the sky; broad rivers, lazily moving toward the sea; mountain streams, splashed with sunlight, singing over rocks. The land is still the same and the land is peaceful. It is the American himself who is filled with tension and who, deep within, longs for quietness and relaxed strength.

Apparently the prevailing tension even affects the dogs, for an Associated Press dispatch from Los Angeles (a city that is not without tension) tells of a sixty pound Airedale dropping dead of a heart attack when two smaller dogs barked at him.

Also, all tension is not in the United States, though with our national tendency to depreciate our own country we talk as though it is. The Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune recently carried a story headed, “Paris Traffic Said to Affect Policemen’s Nerves, Heart.” The story reads: “Many of Paris’ 18,500 policemen have developed cardiac conditions as a result of the French capital’s nerve- wracking traffic situation. Some 2,500 of them are absent from duty every day because of nervous exhaustion after a day’s work whistling, yelling, and pointing their white sticks in Paris streets.”

I noticed in the paper recently an advertisement offering “peace of mind” tires for sale. The reference was to non-blowout tires. This brought to mind a statement by a rubber manufacturer who says that his industry did not learn to make efficient tires until they were designed to absorb road shock rather than merely to resist it. The time has come for all of us to learn to relax and absorb tension rather than rigidly battle it.

Many have learned to develop inner peacefulness and live without tension. On a plane I sat with a prominent business man, a dynamo of driving energy. His daily schedule is packed to the time limit. He has many responsibilities and directs innumerable activities, but handles himself with quiet and impressive power. Asked his secret, he replied, “I simply begin and end each day calmly.”

As to his method for doing this

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