Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘pressure’

This month was very hectic for me and therefore for our entire family. I had many big projects to complete and I could not do them without the help of my family. Gal and the kids helped me a lot and we ended up dedicating almost 3 weekends to this work (we are still recovering from work, work and more work). All this work involved doing things I love, so it made me excited and I was in total flow and winding down was not easy. That made me think about slowing down as the topic this time.

Slowing down is a challenge for many people. The more successful you are at what you do, the more you risk being unable to slow down and enjoy the simple things. Slowing down is a challenge for me, so I am taking the time to write what happened to me in the last month and how I got over it (still doing that).

In the not-so-distant past, most people lived in small places and had to do things themselves. They grew crops, cared for animals, sewed their own clothes, built their own houses, met the same small group of people from childhood to old age and learned about the rest of the world only when strangers came to town.

When something broke, those “olden days” people had to fix it themselves or take it to a specialist, such as the blacksmith or the cobbler. Time was cheap and materials, like metal and medicine, were very expensive and hard to get. There was a lot of time, so life was slow. There was a lot of space and travel was slow, so there was little change.

The world’s culture evolved around this lifestyle. The main values taught to kids were self-sufficiency, industry, thriftiness, modesty, discipline and courtesy. When they grew up, they also learned faithfulness and responsibility.

I have a feeling your parents may have tried to instill some of these values in you too, even if your life was quite different. I know mine did, as did the parents of all my friends.

The general focus of people was on getting things and keeping them. There was little choice, so what people got, they enjoyed.

Today, life is radically different for most people. Most people live in big cities, have easy access to large amounts of food, drink, clothes and other goods and are exposed to a never-ending stream of high-pressured information through the TV, the radio, the Internet, the mobile phone, printed media and various other means.

The general focus of people should be on choosing things and enjoying them. But it is not.

In our time, pressure seems to be everywhere. There is a wealth of information like never before, which means we could find out about anything we wanted, only this takes time, so we look for “drip feeds” that will give us up-to-the-minute updates and we assume our sources do a reasonable job at finding and telling things as they are.

Reality is a bit different, unfortunately. Most of our information feeds are controlled by a fairly small group of huge profit-driven conglomerates, which make their money by selling. To sell well, they need people to “see red”, so they inspire fear via TV news broadcasts, bold newspaper headlines and various other methods.

The result of this is the general view that violent crime is everywhere, that different people cannot live together in harmony and that all too often, the only way to sort things out is to wage war on another ethnic group or country, even at the cost of “friendly” life.

So what can you do?

I bet that if you compare the amount of love you feel for someone, it will correlate well with the amount of hurt you get from them sometimes and possibly with the number of things they do, which trigger a strong emotional response from you.

The world is full of different people, with whom we have relationships of varying closeness and intimacy. More often than not, we find ourselves in conversation with someone wanting to say something, but saying something completely different, because saying what we think would produce the wrong results. This even happens with our partner sometimes, not to mention the kids.

Don’t get me wrong, it is OK to be grown up most of the time. It is OK to work, to clean up, to look after the kids and to be nice to my wife. But all this being-an-adult business requires energy and very often self-denial of good things and sometimes, I simply run out of resources. Luckily, I have kids!

Living in stress is like living in an ambulance all your life. You are on the road most of the day, you live in a small space, not many people around, everything is difficult, your decisions are all about life and death, mistakes are critical, there is no time to waste, not time for fun, not enough time and space to make your own meals, you see (too) many doctors, you develop a dark view of the world from frequent exposure to accidents, drink driving, violence and self neglect. Through the eyes of the stressed person life sucks!

A while ago, I wrote about curing allergies and how you can relieve your kids from pesky breathing problems, rashes and food restrictions by visiting a natural therapist familiar with Muscle Response Testing (MRT) and some basic reflexology (see Curing Allergies). Today, I want to tell you about curing … emotional allergies.

This week, we went for a walk on the most beautiful beach in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia. On the way, we saw some nude people on the sand, in the water, resting and fishing, and we started a discussion about it. Surprisingly, most of these people were mature, even old , so some of us said they were disappointed about not seeing beautiful bodies with “six packs” and great looking tits. I have to say this was the first time I had been to a nudist beach and I mainly liked the discussion that followed.

Who is not afraid of tests?

When I was a school kid (and not a very good one, mind you), I hated tests. I used to be so scared I was sick on the day. Sometimes, this worked and I got to stay at home, but most of the times I still had to go to school and take the test. The more I was afraid of tests, the worse my grades were. You could say that the worse I thought I would do, the more I feared the test.