Taking Control

"Stress Could Save Your Life," this week's issue of Newsweek heralds on its cover, and I sit down to read just how. I read the theories about how stress spikes adrenaline and after that comes cortisol and how in the presence of both muscles are flooded with energy, and not only that, but the brain grows sharper—more sensed up, more survival primed. Turn on that "stress-hormone switch" at the right time, and you might just go super hero when you need a dose of super hero. (Leave that switch on, however, and damage gets done.) Pregnant women who are stressed may be giving birth to babies with better-stimulated brains. Stress may help us solve more problems, faster.

It all comes down to control, apparently. "...if we feel we're in control, we cope," Mary Carmichael, the story's author, says. "If we don't, we collapse." The key to now, Carmichael says, is determining "what parts of our future we can control" and "engag(ing) with them thoughtfully."

I'm all for that. I have, in fact, been discovering, in these tricky times, the outright power of dreaming small dreams bigly (and of making up words, because it's my blog, and I can). Of recomposing my idea of the perfect day. Of taking the time to do things that I had to hurry past before. I can control how I watch the sky, how I fashion meals, how I arrange the day. I can count as an achievement a cleaned-out closet or a page of prose that perhaps no one but myself will read. I can say to my friends, Join me in this, and be happy when they do, and I can hold these things as central even as all that I can't control spins on—the fate of books I write, the status quo with clients, the headlines that keep blaring.

I can't fix most of what is wrong out there (or any of it, frankly). But I can make it a point not to add to the problem—to be lighter on my feet, to ask for little, to give more. I can use the stresses of now to my advantage, and I will try. I don't see that we have another choice.

(Oh, and for the record, I wasn't driving when I took this photo. Imagine the stress I'd have added to the world if I'd been.)