Stress Fracture

It is a measure of our times that stress (aka worry, aka anxiety) has become simultaneously a curse and a badge of honor. As if invoking a code word for special or superior, many boast of being “stressed.” Yet it quickly turns into a catchall excuse for a failure or a misstep or an unkindness. It is a statement of one’s perceived importance that is actually far more revealing of one’s lack of awareness.

One chooses to be stressed and that choice is based in fear of some future occurrence. It is a fictitious state with grave real implications. The effects of prolonged periods of perceived stress are well documented. Playing the stress game is detrimental to one’s physical and mental health, to one’s relationships, to one’s self-image, and to one’s performance. It is a modern version of self-poisoning, for it is a condition that no one can supply or transmit to another.

In The Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis gives one something else to think about in regard to stress. Through a series of letters, Screwtape, a devil of some experience, advises his nephew, Wormwood, himself an up-and-coming demon, on the means of securing “the Patient” to their cause. On the particular issue of one’s focus, he writes:

“Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present…It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity.”

Lewis suggests that stress, in the form of the fascination with imagined failings and horrors, or successes and loves, in the Future, also separates one from Divinity. Therefore, stress, which can only occur when one is focused on something other than the present or “eternity,” is also a sign of spiritual weakness.

Choosing stress thus becomes ones of those pesky exercises in free will which either escorts us farther from or closer to the destination we seek. One can just as easily choose joy or gratitude or peace, any of which ride much easier on the mind, body, and soul.