Introduction
Listening to the Inner GrandmotherOn the death of the obvious   Here's what goes on in a typical day in the life of a person in America at the beginning of the 21st century:   We wake up, probably in a room that has some sort of electronic climate control and closed windows, because who would dare take the risk that we might get an unscheduled breeze in the middle of the night? We wander into the bathroom to brush our teeth: we have four different brands of toothpaste to choose from, one for whitening, one with fluoride protection, one for fresher breath, and one that's 100% organic and natural. We floss, we water-pick, we sandpaper our teeth to the stubs.   Then we take a shower. Our shower head is able to pulsate, vibrate, and gyrate; it can probably even fill in if we need an extra blender. Keep in mind that "multi-tasking" is very important in today's world, so if we can wash our backs and make our breakfast smoothie at the same time, we're golden.   We have a natural soap, a cleansing soap, a moisturizing soap, and an astringent soap. We have soaps that smell like chrysanthemum, rose petals, and lily-of-the-valley; like basil, rosemary, parsley, and avocado. Just choosing the soap we use to wash behind our ears is like picking a week's worth of groceries from the farmer's market. Are we washing our face, or making a marinara sauce?   Next, we wash our hair. We don't use shampoo, no. We use a hair care system. First a pre-wash with a clarifying treatment, then a reconstructor, then a conditioner, then -- depending on the weather -- we choose either a volumizer or a curl enhancer.   We reach for the deodorant, but then remember a television show we saw yesterday that warned us that a new scientific study has determined that when rats are exposed to an amount of deodorant roughly equivalent to the highest peak of Mount Everest, they develop a pre-cancerous condition.   We haven't even left the bathroom and we've used fifteen products, made twenty decisions, had a mild case of panic about our susceptibility to a debilitating disease, and probably feel awful about ourselves because someone who needs so much help can't possibly be good enough to go out into the world. All we want to do is go back to sleep.   But we can't: we all know that in today's world, "if you snooze, you lose," so we get up, we get dressed, we get ready. We go down to breakfast. We open the refrigerator, dig around in the plastic meat bin looking for some bacon to fry -- memories of the delicious smell and fabulous taste of the crisp meat making our mouths water. Then we hear the voice in our head of the low-fat nazi: "You're eating WHAT? Do you know how many calories that has?   Do you know how much saturated fat? You can't eat that! You should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking of that."   So, we skip the bacon. Instead we just grab for two eggs, and we're about to crack them into the pan when, this time, it's the cholesterol police: "Didn't your doctor tell you your level was on the high end of the middle range? Don't eat that! You're asking for trouble."   So we grab a piece of no-fat, high-fiber, twelve-grain bread, and we toast it, and eat it, dry, of course. No butter. It feels like we're munching on tree bark. Every bit of moisture in our body starts surging to our mouth and gets sucked into our cheeks to save us from the drought. That's breakfast. With, of course, a few vitamin supplements washed down with bottled mineral water.   Let's say it's a weekend, not even a workday. We have errands to run, we want to go to the supermarket.   It's a beautiful sunny day, so we lather ourselves with sun block containing SFP45 for the fifteen seconds when we're between the car and the store because, well, you can't be too careful about ultraviolet rays.   In the car we turn on the radio, and we listen to a call-in show in which we hear a woman caller being told she may well have a martyr complex because she chose to eat tree bark for breakfast instead of just having the piece of bacon she craved.   We switch stations, and listen to another call-in show where the caller is told that she may have an eating disorder because she just keeps giving in to her craving for bacon. Has she tried tree bark instead?   We go to the supermarket, and we turn on our cellular phone, hook up our pager, access the shopping list we've downloaded into our palm pilot; we now look more like a member of a swat team than someone shopping for groceries. But God forbid we should be out of touch for ten minutes in case something critical happens. And, since we have the contraptions there with us -- what the hell, we call home and tell everyone we got bread.   We get the groceries home, and then we start a trauma unit in our kitchen, pulling on our rubber gloves, scrubbing every surface with disinfectant, keeping children under the age of eighteen out of the line of fire, as we open the package of chicken. After all, you can never be too careful when it comes to chicken. And do we dare wash it with water from the tap? That's just as unhealthy. No, we wash the chicken with Evian.   * * * Let's face it. We've gone mad.   I've been working in the field of wellness and stress reduction for thirty years, trying to help people relieve the effects of stress in their lives, and I've done it with the help of my own innate sense of the absurd. I see life as funny. I always have.   Call me crazy (and believe me, many people have), but I think that what most of us do in the course of a normal day is more ridiculous and hilarious than any episode of Seinfeld. I mean, really. Think about it! Think about the number of choices and the minutiae and the fear and the insecurity that we all have to face just to get through the day.   Look closely at what's going on today: as a nation we spend 9.3 billion dollars a year on stress management. 9.3 BILLION! And is it really because we're living in a time that is so much more difficult than for the generations that came before us? Generations that were faced with World Wars, extreme poverty, sexual and racial intolerance, and unfair access to education?   Are we stressed out because we face real life-threatening situations day-in and day-out, or is it because we have become a nation of individuals who have lost touch with reality and the things that are really important?   It seems to me that the quickened pace, the media images, the technology of immediacy, and the pressure of nonstop marketing has eclipsed rational thinking and common sense. I think we're suffering from the death of the obvious. I spend a big part of my time these days helping people relieve stress by getting in touch with their own clear vision of common sense: by helping them to see just how absurd and needlessly complex and stressful the details of our lives have become.   What I long for, and what I think most people long for, is a return to sanity. And over the last several years we've seen that craving manifest itself in the "simplicity" movement, and in what some people call the "return to spirituality."   People look in different places. But it seems to me that in a way, what we're all looking for is a way to live the life that people lived fifty or sixty years ago. Despite the fact that for many people it seems almost pandemic to suggest this, our grandparents' generation was a lot saner than ours is today. It was more in touch and more involved with friends, family, and community. Is it possible to go back? Of course not. No one is going to go back to the days before cordless phones or exercise classes or television or e-mail. And, in fact, to think that the lives our grandparents lived was better than ours is a little naïve. There was terrible hardship and poverty for much of that generation. Their lives were smaller in scope, and their possibilities narrower.   Still, I think there are lessons to be learned from yesterday's lifestyle. A great deal of what I am going to try to accomplish in this book is to try to find the balance between the possibilities of today's world and the sanity of yesterday's.   * * * Speaking of sanity, I find it fascinating, and more than a little encouraging, that a new movement has been shaking up the ranks of psychology. Called "positive psychology," and led by Dr. Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism, it proposes the idea that professionals should be paying more attention to what's right with their patients than what's wrong with them.   This movement makes the case that ever since Freud, the disciplines of psychology and psychiatry have short-sightedly focussed on illness and dysfunction -- on helping patients to recover from, or "cope with" their weaknesses. Seligman and his followers think that this current practice -- the treating of people with psychological disorders such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and the like -- is only one part of what psychology should be examining. The area that psychology has been ignoring, and that could have a more powerful and beneficial effect on the human race, is the study of the human strengths, such as optimism, resiliency, hope, love, joy, originality, good parenting, civility, altruism, and moderation.   They believe that psychology should grow to encompass the study of virtue and human strengths, not just weakness and dysfunction.   I applaud Dr. Seligman and the people who are working toward developing this science. We're a society that is obsessed with paying attention to the negative and to dysfunction; on coping with how awful life is rather than on learning how to enjoy, and celebrate, how wonderful it is.   But I also find myself laughing, because when I think of the millions of dollars being spent to convince people that this is a worthy pursuit, I step back for a moment and think, "Wait a minute! My grandmother knew this stuff!" Nobody had to tell the people of my grandparents' generation that the way to live a contented and fulfilled life was to focus on things like moderation, altruism, connection, humor, originality and civility. These things were a given for their generation. These values were taught by society, and people lived by them, often instinctively, or if not, by sheer parental force.   I want us to think about why these qualities seemed so much more important to our grandparents' generation than they do to ours. And I want us to think about what we can do to clear the clutter out of our lives and bring back what's important.   It's so sad that today, the qualities we see being honored in the mass media are often the opposite of our grandparents' values. Think about it: aggressiveness, ennui, rudeness, impatience, self-entitlement, narcissism. Aren't those the qualities we see over and over in the media, personified by the celebrities who become famous and revered in our society?   We live in a time full of amazing promise and opportunity, a time when the entire world is open for us to explore. Creativity and communication and adventure and even FUN could be the center points of rich and rewarding lives. But the stresses and the over-stimulation, the hype and the exhaustive nature of so much of today's lifestyle throws so many of us out of whack. We stop seeing the potential for wonder around us and only see the demands for our resources.   Sometimes even the things we think might be the answer, like "simplifying" or "spirituality," become further demands that make us feel still more inadequate and therefore more stressed.   The trick is to see the inauthenticity of what is being presented to us. So many of the elements of today's lifestyle are psychologically harmful: we're offered quick fixes and consumer goods as a way to assuage and cover up our feeling of emptiness.   We used to walk home after work to find the house filled with delicious aromas, and with other people waiting there, happy to see us. Now, that's a distant memory. The closest we get is watching television ads that show people using a new hair gel that makes them happy. Dogs are leaping in the air, the sun is shining, and big happy families are gathered in front of pristine homes and manicured lawns, sharing their joy over the new Dodge Durango.   Kalle Lasn, a Canadian activist, believes that "young people have been stewed from birth in an unprecedented marinade of advertising." And that leads to us all suffering from "possession obsession." We truly believe that there are products that can make us happy.   The things that were important to my grandparents' generation more clearly resembled the values of "positive psychology." Everything was done in moderation and with a certain degree of bemused skepticism. My grandmother would never have bought a bottled marinara sauce just because it had a photo of a nice-looking Italian woman on the label holding a wooden spoon, or because it came from an exclusive gourmet shop. She would have laughed at it, said "no thank you," and have gone on to make what she knew was her own far superior sauce. Her self-esteem wasn't tied into buying an expensive product. She was the product!   If we could all just take a step back and take the time to think about the absurdity of so much of what we have let infiltrate our lives, and how it leads to stress, anger, pain and impotent longing, we might feel lighter of spirit, more joyful, and spiritually richer.

WHY DO YOU SUPPOSE WE HAVE PEOPLE KILLING EACH OTHER DUE TO ROAD RAGE NOW? IN THE YEAR 2000? WHEN CARS ARE AIR CONDITIONED AND HAVE COMPACT DISC PLAYERS AND TELEPHONES? AND NOT IN OUR GRANDPARENTS' GENERATION WHEN THEY WENT 40 MPH, AND ENDED UP BROKEN DOWN ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD NINE TIMES OUT OF TEN?

If we exchange my grandmother's bemused skepticism for modern day euphemisms, we might get something called "the big DUH!" -- a term I learned from one of my grandkids. You know what a "duh" is? It's something so obvious that, from a kid's point of view, you're pretty dumb if you don't understand it already. It's got a silent ring of derision, as if you added the term "you jerk" at the end, but of course, you don't have to.   I think the first time I heard the phrase was when I took two of my grandchildren to the movies. During a particularly tense scene, when a character was walking through a dark empty house at night or something like that, the six-year-old whispered over to me and to the nine-year-old: "something bad is going to happen," and the nine-year-old said back to him: "Well, duh!"   Now, maybe it's just me (I've been told that I have a somewhat unique perspective on the world), but I think a lot of the nonsense I see around me, and a lot of the things that cause people inordinate amounts of stress in their lives, are big "duh's."   Why, for example, is there such an enormous amount of rage? There is road rage, air rage, cyber rage, gender rage, inner city rage, supermarket rage. It feels like everyone is pissed off at someone or something. One of my favorite rage stories comes from the Internet. It has to do with flight delays that occurred during some very bad weather in Chicago. There was a long line of people waiting to be re-booked, and the gate agent was doing her best to attend to everyone's needs. Most of the customers were patiently waiting their turn. But I guess there's always someone who refuses to believe that flying in a thunderstorm is not the wisest thing.   A gentleman pushed his way to the front of the line and stated that he simply had to get on the next flight because he had an important meeting to attend. The agent politely explained that he had to wait his turn, that there were a lot of people in front of him. He kept insisting and then finally asked, in a very pompous tone of voice "do you know who I am?"   The agent grabbed her microphone and announced to the crowd: "Attention! Attention! Does anyone here know who this man is? He seems to have lost his identity!" The man was insulted and immediately countered with "Well, screw you." She responded," Sir, you'll have to get to the back of the line to do that, too. There are a lot of people ahead of you!"   The whole crowd burst into applause. Now, of course we realize that this sort of sarcasm could put the airline out of business pretty fast, but the applause from the crowd proves that people are excited when arrogance is not rewarded. And isn't that what a lot of the rage is about? Arrogance, self-entitlement, a low threshold of frustration? They've all grown out of a society in which we want all our demands attended to IMMEDIATELY.   It's like so many of us have turned into the toddler who can only think and say "Me want candy NOW," including the tendency to throw tantrums. In my grandmother's generation, kids were met with raised eyebrows from their parents, and they knew that they'd better back down. My own mother used to say "Just who do you think you are?" and if that didn't work, the good sisters of Saint Joseph were there to report your misbehavior to God. That kept people feeling humble. Humility can sometimes keep rage in check.   But if being humble doesn't click for you, then let me give you a good dose of fear. Everytime you get enraged, your blood pressure goes up, your heart rate escalates, your body becomes extremely tense. You could even have a heart attack or stroke. You put yourself at the risk of major injury or death, because someone has gotten one car length ahead of you, or because someone at the supermarket has nine items in the eight item checkout line. This is a big "duh."   Yes, I'm being irreverent, and believe me I realize it's not that simple. However, if you can take a step back and really do some critical thinking, you can begin to see another point of view. No matter how big a rush you're in, no matter how long you've waited in traffic, banging your head against the windshield is stupid. Do you know what my grandmother would have said? "Stunata!" which translates to "the lights are on, but nobody's home."   Here's a quick bit of advice: when you feel yourself getting enraged, try instead to engage. Engage your rational mind by asking yourself "what's the point of this outburst?" Take a step back. Your irrational mind would like you to act out an entire episode of Chicago Hope, because it makes you feel important. But let's face it, not everything is an emergency! Instead of giving into the rage, really think about what you're doing, and remember how silly enraged behavior really is, most of the time. When is the last time you saw someone really acting out in fury? Was it a pretty sight?   * * * What I want to accomplish with this book is to point out the absurdity. I want us all to take a step back and look at some of the things we do today through our grandmothers' eyes. I want us to all learn to think about how the values that were important to that generation can be used as a filter against the stuff that can make our lives so difficult.   I think there's something inherently absurd about our society today, something that's filling us all with stress and rage and anger, and the first step toward helping ourselves out of the mess we find ourselves in is simply to start to notice. We have to stop buying into the things that we now consider normal, but that our grandparents would have thought were insane. We have to see the big "duh's."   I am helped to see the "duh's" by thinking of my grandparents, and in particular my grandmother Francesca. I often carry around a picture of her in my head and think, "What would Francesca have said about this?" (Often the answer is "have a little meatball, you'll feel better.")   My grandmother, a first-generation Italian, lived in a loud, bustling neighborhood in Brooklyn in which the doors were always open and the kitchen was always full. But she was quite prim and proper. Her values and her sensibility were almost puritan -- if it wasn't for the smell of spaghetti sauce that always infused the house, she could have been the Queen of England! (In fact, my grandfather used to call her "la Regina" -- the Queen.)   It was important to her to always do the "right" thing, the "proper" thing. She cared a lot about what other people thought of her family. She made sure that her children were well dressed, well groomed, spoke politely and had impeccable manners.   And she loved to cook! She loved to stuff everyone and everything. Cooking was her creative outlet. She'd go to the store -- which was a place not only to do the marketing, but to gossip with the shopkeepers and the other neighbors -- and depending on what looked good to her that day, she'd devise a menu. She needed to be creative, because there was not a lot of money in those days. I remember her saying to me once, "today I am making lamb stew, but without the lamb." Whatever it was she made, it was wonderful; and it was very important to her that there was always food around to serve. No one stopped by without getting a taste of something fantastic.   And the sweets! Ah, she knew how to please the grandchildren with sweets. I remember begging her for her zabaglione, which is a rich custard sweetened with wine. (Yes, wine! But a tiny amount...) Grabbing onto the apron, I would cry, "Please, Grandma, make me a zabaglione." And if I was extra good, she would. Even when she was eighty and could no longer cook, she would carry around her big black purse that always had a few candies rattling around the bottom for us kids.   These days, some people might say that was a form of emotional bribery, offering sweets for good behavior. You know what? That zabaglione was the best bribe I ever had.   It was important to her to solve problems. I remember once as a young girl complaining because I would always wear out my new pants because my inner thighs rubbed together (even then, I had these thighs to deal with!). One day I came home from school and she had sewn pieces of leather into the crotch and inner thighs of all my pants. I looked like the lone ranger in those pants! I was embarrassed to wear them in school, but to grandma Francesca's mind, she solved the problem.   She worked hard, and she played safe. She was always thinking of the future, and what the family needed. She micromanaged the household finances, and made do with what she had. She did her best to stretch the money, but would never think of taking advantage of someone else, or of taking what she considered a handout. She was much too proud for that.   Nothing was more important to her than her family. She would hound and hound people to make sure that they kept the family ties close. "Call your brother! It doesn't matter that he did something stupid. Call him!" The family would gather in her house at every holiday, and several times in between, not just for "special" occasions, but really the opposite: for ordinary occasions. Being with the family was the norm, not the exception. We didn't have to schedule "quality time."   She had common sense.

THE TRICK IS TO LISTEN TO YOUR "INNER GRANDMOTHER." SHE'S GOT A LITTLE MORE WISDOM THAN YOUR INNER CHILD.

In the coming chapters, I'm going to point out the things about modern life that are absurd -- the things that would have made Francesca look around and say stunata! You can try to hear the voice of your own grandparent, if you had one whom you consider wise. Or else think about an aunt, a godparent, someone from an earlier generation whose common sense you admire. The point is to keep conscious of how the earlier generation, the one that existed before the incessant pressure of media and marketing, managed to live their lives in such a way that they had less stress and anxiety and pain than we have today.   Of course, this is just a tool. In all cases, what you need to be doing is developing your own common sense. We are all filled with it, and deep down, we all know what's right, and what we need from our lives. We just get so bamboozled by the world around us that we have come to accept the ridiculous as the commonplace.   Listen to your inner voice, and you'll know what we all long for. We long for a world in which real human interaction is honored over virtual communication; where creativity and accomplishment is valued more in the workplace than doublespeak and exploitation; where civility is more important than faux spirituality; where health is more important than glamour; where we buy products for enjoyment, not out of intimidation; and where closeness is more cherished than status.   Those of you reading this who know my work know that I believe that laughter is the best medicine for our stressful times. Once we learn to lighten up and not take the small things so seriously, we find an enormous weight lifted off our shoulders. In this book, I want us all to laugh a lot at what a mess we've made of our daily lives. And through laughter, I want to help us separate the noise around us from the clarity within us. I want to help us stop bringing external pressures inside our bodies. I want us to stop blaming ourselves for not being the ideal specimen that the marketers put forth as normal.   I want to help us hear the voices of our grandmothers who would listen to some of the stuff we obsess about today, shake their heads in dismay, whack us on the side of the head and say: Just Stop It! And, in a nutshell, I want to help us get a grip on reality (as Robin Williams used to say, what a concept!) to help us remember the things that are important, which all too often get lost in the noise of modern life. We need to focus on the values that make human beings great: optimism, resiliency, hope, love, originality, good parenting, civility, altruism and moderation. The goal, for all of us, is to get back to a life that has less stress and more meaning, and I hope that laughing about the everyday insanity I talk about in this book can help you in the same ways that it helps me and the people I work with stay focused on the things that really matter.   Listen, every human being walking on earth has two things in common. We're all alive, and we're all going to end up dead. We can either let the absurdity of modern life drive us to the grave sooner, or we can laugh at it and have more fun while we're here. As I've said in my presentations and now in the title of this book, life is not a "stress" rehearsal. This is our one chance to live it in a way that is fun, that is filled with the wonders of love and human greatness, and that has meaning. In fact, instead of wasting our lives in a stress rehearsal, I want us to engage in stress reversal! Let's have less insanity and more fun.   Isn't that what it's all about?

Luther - It's about time you went on a little drinking binge :-)