INTRODUCTION

“The world is just going mental as far as I’m concerned. It’s speeding up with the whole technology and everything that’s happening. I think I should call my next album ‘Your Planet Is Doomed, Volume I.’
–Former Beatle George Harrison

On my desk is a book on stress. The first twenty-two pages consist of something the authors call “The Stress Test.” Picking up a pencil just moments ago, I began answering questions like “If you could change your life in one major way, what would that be?”

I paused briefly to consider the question, then wrote, “I would quit taking this test.”

After all, I couldn’t concentrate. My mind was dizzy with all I had to do. I was staring down the barrel of three deadlines. My daughter’s temperature had reached 102. The phone was ringing. Bills were threatening. And the lengthy form reminded me that my taxes were due in a week.

Speaking of taxes, someone sent me the government’s new revised tax form. I think you’ll like it:

1. How much did you make last year?    $ _______
2. Send it in.

I think a stress test should be like this. I think a stress test should take into consideration that the person filling it out is probably in no mood to answer questions like “On a scale of one to ten, how frustrated do you feel right now?” So, rather than hit you over the head with another comprehensive survey, here is my New Condensed Stress Test. You won’t even need a pencil.

1. Are you living in the 21st century?
2. Are you reading this book?

If you answered “yes” to either of these questions, chances are that your world is on fast forward and you are wondering where to get off.

Scientists say the earth is spinning at just over 1,000 miles an hour and that we’re speeding around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. To make matters worse, our solar system is moving within our galaxy at 900,000 kilometres an hour. If it weren’t for a little apple that hit Isaac Newton on the head, we would be hurled into space at an early age (something that would certainly increase our insurance premiums). But lately the earth seems to be picking up even more speed.

Pollsters say that 86 percent of Americans claim to be “chronically stressed out.” The National Center for Health Statistics reports that almost 1 million people a year lose their lives to diseases caused by “unmanaged stress.” To cope we now ingest about 60,000 pounds of aspirins, tranquilizers, and sleeping pills a day. Thankfully that’s not per person, but the sum is still staggering.

We change jobs between seven to ten times in our lifetime. According to U.S. News & World Report, women, on average, do so every 5.8 years and men every 7.6 years. We change houses even more rapidly. Back in 1835 Alexis De Tocqueville wrote, “A man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on.” Atlantic Monthly proved him right. It reports that the average American occupies twelve or thirteen residences in a lifetime, twice as many as the average person in Britain or France and four times as many as the typical Irish. Our children change schools and friends, while we change churches, neighbors, dentists, and grocery stores. For many of us busyness, fatigue, and stress have become unwelcome companions on this journey. My mother informs me that since she married my father (centuries ago), they have lived in thirty-two different houses.

One medical doctor said, “I am dying of easy accessibility. If Alexander Graham Bell walked into my office, I’d punch him in the nose. If he called, you can be sure I’d put him on hold.” So many people have answered their cell phones in the middle of the night inadvertently sticking the antenna into their ears, that doctors have given the syndrome a name: “yuppie ear.” “Beepilepsy” is the momentary panic suffered when one’s pager goes off. How times have changed since Daniel Boone said, “All you need for happiness is a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife” (not sure if it was in that particular order or not).

More than thirty years ago, about the time Bob Dylan was singing “The times, they are a changin’,” Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock sold millions, warning of a “roaring current of change, a current so powerful today that it overturns institutions, shifts our values and shrivels our roots. Change is the process by which the future invades our lives…unless man quickly learns to control the rate of change in his personal affairs as well as in society at large, we are doomed to a massive adaptational breakdown.”

If anything characterizes the last 30 years it is change. And change easily gives birth to worry, fear, and stress. So how do we learn to control the rate of change?

The same year Toffler’s book was released, on a blisteringly hot July day, my mom and dad buckled four kids into a 1965 Pontiac Parisienne, complete with magnetic vinyl seats, and pointed it toward Toronto, Ontario, Canada. (I also smuggled aboard two birds in a Corn Flakes box.) My father was an ordained minister and I think the closest I ever saw him come to swearing was when our air conditioner quit. But for a ten-year-old boy, the world looked pretty good from that back seat. Birds sang sweetly right there in the car (much to my parents’ amazement) and we were already too far from home to warrant their return. I sipped my first root beer that day, ice cold from a gas station icebox. My sister Ruth taught me to play Rochambo (Rock-Paper-Scissors) and I beat her badly. Six days, three flat tires, and twenty-three hundred miles later we arrived at our destination, tired and happy. I had mourned the flight of my two birds on that trip, honed the art of playing an imaginary drum set, and learned to shoot at frogs with a B-B gun (thankfully I never hit one).

Last week I made the same journey at 600 miles an hour in less than 4 hours. As I hurried through the airport to catch a shuttle bus, I remembered that trip thirty Julys ago, and wondered if our world is really any better off.

I’m not the only one wondering.

When I told a friend in the office next to mine about this book project, she laughed and said, “Hurry up and write it. I need it today!” Then she put her elbows on her desk, let out a soft sigh and said, “What can we do to balances things…to slow our lives down?”

That is one of the questions I hope to answer in the next 200 pages. I will not do this with thousands of statistics you have already read—more data to tire you out. You already know that we are running at an unprecedented pace. That change easily engenders fear, worry, and Extra Strength Tylenol. Instead, I will tell my own story (though I wish some of it weren’t true) and the stories of people who have discovered humorous and creative ways of climbing off the merry go round without spraining their ankles.

During the past few years I have talked with hundreds of people about their pace of life, asking them what has helped them most. From the mountain of material I’ve uncovered five secrets I can’t wait to share with you. Some of the advice comes from billionaires, millionaires, CEOs and VIPs, but mostly it is from regular folk like you and me, people who are so tired they can barely lace up their Velcro tennis shoes. And you’ll discover as they have that peace, simplicity, and joy are achievable—even on a planet that spins at 1,000 miles an hour.

Chapter One