Help Yourself

In a packed morning “subway” car, I accidentally witnessed such a scene. Two familiar women collided face-to-face. They squealed: “Well, how are things?” — “Oh, total stress!”

Ever since the outstanding Canadian physiologist G. Selye launched that word into orbit, it has firmly entered our lexicon alongside “satellites,” “microcalculator,” and “aerobics.” Stress never lets us forget itself through an enormous number of heart attacks and neuroses, various dystonias. Even an ulcer is considered a social disease.

People started running in the mornings, plunging into pools in their free time, and stomping over rubberized tennis court surfaces. “Meet the troubles of life with a brisk jog”—besides this simple motto and tranquilizers (alas, not harmless for health) to relieve stress, medicine can offer nothing else.

But what if someone appeared and said: “A few absolutely non-burdensome, even pleasant trainings—and I will teach you to control your body”? Would we go after him?

We would.

He would teach a student to arrive cheerful for exams during exhausting sessions; he would spare a woman worker at a watch factory the prospect of professional myopia; he would keep a sleepless official from insomnia and teach him to fall asleep sweetly at a convenient time. He would cure our city migraines, and we would go to the dentist with smiles on every last tooth, because we would learn not to feel pain.

The mysterious leans toward the marvelous. The marvelous leans toward mysticism. Hard to believe that someone might have a key to himself.