Surviving stress

Stress is a huge psycho-social problem for many people living in developed countries like Sweden. The more I grapple with the particularities of the word in practical terms, the more I feel the weight of the word in actual life.

I didn't know the meaning of stress when I was living in the Philippines but when I look back at the life and death instances I have been in, stress as I understand now was a "walk in the park" in those days.

How do I deal with the periodic presence of stress that comes like an uninvited dinner guest? In my present workplace, I find it unavoidable to ignore stress - mostly physical stress owed to dealing with people who are sick and dying. Imagine how infectious the feeling is to be with old, sick, helpless and lonely people where no amount of music and cheering up can activate the heart; where the physical being has already given up on life and the only thing that remains is the hope of a final freedom from all pain and sufferings. This picture seen daily is excruciatingly stressful.

I go home at the end of the day feeling worn-out, my life exiting out of my body in a strange metamorphosis that is shapeless like a running river. I come home seeking a re-birth of my soul gone old and weary. How do I go through a transformation - like leaving dead skin by the doorstep and obtaining a fresh one in matters of minutes?

I find that the most effective antidote to stress is not any form of energy tablet or drink. It is something as abstract as love and affection, a sense of satisfaction that a good job was done, and most importantly that the people close to one's heart are happy in their own ways.

I came to an article today on how human touch works miracles against stress and against all forms of oppression one meets especially in the workplace. When I come home, I want to be showered with affection - to be caressed from head to foot, to feel the other person's warmth and longing. And then, that feeling of tiredness, of stress simply vanishes. Many go for luxury massage and spa treatment to get rid of that edgy, aging feeling. But, the simplest cure comes from the person who cares about you. Imagine how much it means even just to hold hands while you watch a not-so-sexy movie?

No, this is not being corny. In an egalitarian society like Sweden, the biggest social problem is loneliness. Too many people are living alone. There is no medicine for loneliness other than the company of another human being. Like the title of a recent French movie I saw, "Tillsammans är vi mindre ensam" ("Together, we are less alone."#

The other side of loving

The heart is the life-sustaining organ of the body and its most important function goes beyond its physiological reason for its being. It is the major locomotive that controls and regulates all forms of human emotions, of which love is the most powerful and all-encompassing. Without the heart one becomes heartless, take away love and the heart dies.

The topic of love is timeless. It is the Muse of all Muses. Everything in the world that is beautiful and worth living for is owed to the existence of love that lives in the heart. There is a symbiotic relationship between the heart and love and the delicate connection is held by a constant continuity called loving.

Loving is a precarious but exciting state of the heart. It is expressed in many hundred small things and deeds, some knowingly and others innocently. Some forms of loving are more desired than others depending upon the expectations placed on the emotion itself. Is it an absolute commitment fulfilled by acts of devotion and loyalty. Where is the limit? Who sets the limit of one's expectation. Is the limit mutually acceptable or does each one in the party of two have individual limits for manifesting acts of loving. Can one accept that one's limit is beyond the reach of the other person so that some measure of adjustment is needed.

The need to adjust limits and expectations often create disturbance in the state of loving. This is the other side of loving, the small challenges to face now and then when love slips into a state of sluggish comfort; when one forgets that love in all its whims and caprices is constantly seeking a confirmation of its presence. If one forgets a kiss before departing for work and at homecomings, it disrupts the harmony of loving and poses a question - silly as it seems, "Does he/she still loves me?" And if there is no reciprocal hugging at the end of the day, it feels like one came to a wrong home.

The home is indeed where the heart is - a common but still valuable cliche in love and in loving. It warms up the heart when one says to the other "You are my home, you have my heart and all the love it can muster". Hearing something like this erases instantly the battles one fights outside, the disappointments in the workplace, the grievances over perceived injustices and the nagging discontent over certain failures in the management of the planet Earth.

When the other person asks in a perplexed tone: "Why do we have to quarrel when there is so much love between us?" To this I answer with the certainty of knowing that spring comes after winter - no matter how long the snow and ice suppress the lilies from bursting out of the hard-frozen ground: "Because it is all part of loving".
(The picture is a painting of Gustav Klint's famous original "The Kiss".)

A different kind of poverty

In the Swedish Svenska Dagbladet today was an opinion column entitled "Swedish poverty has many faces" by Göran Skytte, which jolted my memory back to one of my graduate courses at the Stockholm University. We were then discussing the Swedish welfare state and what it has achieved over a 100- year period since it became the pillar of the social system. It was going to erase poverty and close the gap between the very rich and the very poor through an egalitarian system of wealth distribution.

This is through taxation in proportion to one's earning. The higher the wages and corporate profits, the more one pays to the tax authority. Welfarism consists of a social security system where the individual is state-protected from "cradle to coffin". It was going to erase poverty, including the word poverty from the Swedish dictionary of welfare state. This dream state was designed for a population then of around five million natural-born Swedes. It was not a huge unwieldy number of people to support with state generosity.

Today, the population make-up of Sweden has dramatically changed after the influx of refugee and asylum-seekers from Africa, the Middle East and the Balkan countries. Sweden opened its doors to people fleeing from war and accommodated as many it could take. The welfare state became over-burdened with social issues of integration, unemployment, religious fanaticism and a deteriorating economic situation for a majority of people living on the fringes of society.

This is what the social cancer the Swedish politicians call utanförskap or outsiders. They are mostly wards of the social system because they are economically poor. Despite the unemployment benefits, child subsidy, housing subsidy and other forms of state interventions - this new population group in Sweden are users rather than contributors in the welfare state system that is based on taxes. To be economically poor in a well-functioning welfare state is not the same poverty in comparison with those living in other parts of the world where one gets nothing from the state.

But the other kind of poverty we have ignored is the poverty of the soul, the spiritual bareness of the human self that is not easily discerned from outside. The material world has overwhelmed us with the tangible proof of success and prosperity that we are actually drowning from the weight of these things. When Mother Theresa took her Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she was alleged to have said: " This is a poor country". Wealth cannot be measured in the number of cars, big houses, luxury boats and material acquisitions. If one cannot spend a moment in prayer at the end of the day and if there is no soul that inhabits the physical self then we are indeed extremely poor. #

The other sisters in chains

Today more than any other time of the year, the world looks at the situation of women in certain cultures and countries. If half the women population has improved its position in society with the help of national legislations that recognise equality between men and women, the other half remains chained to medieval traditions where women existence is not even recognised.

What reminders have come out of the newspapers today? One is a collective call signed by well-known Swedish personalities urging the European Union to legislate harsher punishment committed against women in war-torn areas, such as sexual exploitation by peace-keeping soldiers in places like Bosnia, and the sexual violence committed by soldiers and militiamen against the women folk in places like Rwanda. It is now well-known that rape has become an instrument of torture in war zones. To stop sexual abuses of women in countries at war means that war itself has to be stopped. That in itself is a major agenda.

Putting aside the situation of women in war areas in Africa and the Middle East where sexual violence is a daily routine and focusing on women condition in peaceful modern societies, many women are victims of domestic violence - that is to say, violence in the hands of their nearest kin. The statistics on domestic violence is not going down. On the contrary, it has been steadily rising along with other social ailments related to unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse and the transplanting of medieval social and religious practices in European soil, where women are literally still in chains. How else would one describe a mask that shows only the eyes of the woman?

The other gender inequalities such as unequal wages between men and women, or less women leaders in the corporate world are daily fights to take up and chances are that, the social structures that create these barriers will eventually diminish. But the removal of chains imposed by religion and tradition is a harder challenge because it will question the men's superiority in these cultures. As for sexual violence in war areas, the agenda is stopping war itself. And that is the hardest challenge of all.#

Letting out rage without killing

Anger is an untamed beast inside us. Does it change with age when wisdom and reason dominate over rage and violence? Many people experience in their later years a mellowing in the way they express anger, resentment, protest, denial and discontent caused by a betrayal of trust and trespassing over one's sense of integrity.

To get angry is to lose one's temper. One can be short-tempered or even-tempered depending upon the degree of violation one perceives in the hand of the offending party. The worst kind of anger and the one that hurts the most like the instant piercing of a dagger is the one that comes from persons we love the most. In other words, the more one loves a person, the more painful it is to release anger.

I cannot count the number of times I have been angry and have lost my temper to the point of wanting to murder the object of my hatred. The more intense one loves, the greater the explosion of anger and grief that comes and the expression is often self-destructive. I have been angry when I thought that my innocence over some things was violated. There was a time in my young life when falling in love was an end in itself. But then I discovered that the object of my great love had feet of clay, that shattered my belief in love itself. So I learned that love is not immortal and words of affection can turn into acts of anger.

Outside the realm of the heart where anger can strike deepest, work is an open arena for conflict and confrontation. The more stress one meets in one's work, the easier it is to explode in anger. In the field of journalism where the most unpredictable situations can take place, it is a daily bread to lose temper with almost anything, from bad traffic to boring press conferences. At the end of the day when you thought you had written your best news report, your editor comes back with a copy you hardly recognise was yours originally. So, you succumb to curses from the typewriter to the nearest bar. ( Yes, in those times there were no computers which meant that you did not have to bribe a hacker to spread virus in your own editorial office.)

There are small and big things that provoke us everyday into a mood of rage. Living in Sweden may have tamed the beast in me because it is the Swedish norm of life to be average ( lagom ) in all forms of expressions and actions, average in wealth, in intelligence, in looks, in consumption, in emotions - in literally everything. Anything excessive is social taboo. But, I have realised that instead of becoming angry over certain things - where I have little power to control or change, I end up being indifferent and feeling totally divorced from the situation itself.

A dangerous place to find oneself , this place of apathy because we cease to be members of a society where our voices and our choices, no matter how self-motivated still count in the collective world we live in. If there is anything that truly tames the beast in anger it is most probably the feeling of being a part of something whole, somewhere safe for the heart to take refuge when the going gets rougher. #

The unbearable weight of winter

Two weeks in Cape Verde, in West Africa offered an enormous relief from winter's deepest temperature plunge. It was already bad that December battered us physically especially when the first major snowfall came and halted life into a state of immobility. While the Nordic countries was frozen in ice and most of Europe - including the sunny southern countries of Spain, Italy and Portugal encountered a winter uncommon in these places - Cape Verde seemed completely untroubled by climactic temper.

Upon returning to Stockholm in mid-January, the winter cold's assault appeared unabated. The two weeks of perfect bliss in Cape Verde had suddenly turned into many grim realities. First, it was the discovery that one of our cars was stolen from the parking lot - an old Ford car actually with plenty of carpentry tools at the luggage compartment had fancied som thieves. The second bad news was that, the M/S Tranan boat that my other half

drives went aground, its engine busted in the icy waters. And thirdly, the neighbour's garage near our summer house collapsed from the weight of snow.

The mass transport system consisting of the underground train and buses - which is usually effective with schedules are either delayed or derailed because the snow plowers cannot cope with the job of clearing the roads and tracks. Driving one's car is a life and death adventure and it does not matter how carefully you drive if the others are careless, they could collide with yours or drive you to the canal. By the way, with a heavy snowfall there is no way of knowing where the roadsides are and where the canals and ditches begin.

The working hours are much longer and tedious. The thought that the end of the day could be some happy meetings with friends at a pub or a restaurant becomes less palatable at the thought of coming home late and getting oppressed by the cold. It is not just the coldness of the weather that makes life immobile. It is also the lack of light, of sun that caresses your skin as when you are in a beach and feeling the warmth of sunshine in a state that reminds you of how it is to fall in love, to be in love. But the real consolation is that, the long winter nights do offer a much longer time for huggings and being huddled in a perfect state of unity.#

Unmended hearts

Today is Valentine Day - a date set aside to celebrate the unique role of the heart in making one's body and soul in a perfect state of reciprocity. Hopefully , there are many whose hearts feel happy and content because of the feeling of being in love and loved, as well. It is also possible that there are many lonely hearts who just lost the object of affection and who are hurting deeply.

If we speak emotionally, how do we really secure the well-being of the heart. Two people can be in love today and become bitter enemies the next day. How fickle can the heart be? How strong can promises of timeless love become in the face of differences that seem to get deeper with every argument? I have learned through the years that love is its own enemy, that the more one loves the more claustrophobic the relationship gets. It feels that love becomes a vine and simply strangles the life out of the other. One suffers from a relationship that lacks trust and respect.

I have women friends with unmended hearts and their stories have great variations. One is a love story that goes back to her university days where the heart never recovered from the hurt of loss. Without a closure in her love affair, her succeeding relationships were always faulty and imperfect. Another friend who is an accomplished lawyer woke up one morning to learn that her husband of many Valentine celebrations just took up a relationship with a younger woman from Africa. Despite many opportunities for meeting worthy men, the heart is taking a longer time to heal and does not respond to love eagerly.

The sadder story that I hear from another friend is her perpetual search for the right man - a man who can share her quest for security and even more, her emotional passion for love in all its manifestations. So she goes on with the hunting - from one matchmaking website to another and from one singel bar to the next. The sex partners are not that hard to find it would seem, but how does one build a relationship based on a few nights of passionate sex? She runs into variations of male imperfections from false marital status to sexual inadequacy.

I suppose that today would be a good time to re-examine that state of health of our hearts. Unmended hearts can eventually lead to one's death as in cardiac arrest. There is only so much anguish and punishment the heart can take and when it is in trouble, the rest of the body suffers. What I am trying to say is that, it is not worth it to over-indulge in self-flagellation in the name of love. Love is not a state of perfection where it is spring forever. Love must be able to survive the worst there is in one's person as much as we try to endure a truly hard winter as we have now. As the cliche goes, fight for your love but don't kill yourself over love.#