Relax? Don't do it without some musical accompaniment
On one of those recent days when still more newspapers were filing for bankruptcy, closing their doors, and driving old friends out of the profession, I was feeling a little tense.
Workers across the suburbs know the feeling. Even a few incumbent mayors woke up Wednesday with that new laid-off smell. Not having a job is stressful. Looking for a job is stressful. So is just worrying that you might have to look for a new job because you are scared your current job might not last.
A generation ago, a tense columnist might just reach into his desk drawer for a shot of liquid relaxation, blow smoke rings from his cigarette and exchange obscenities with his editor until they both achieved a state of essential, existential, expletive calm.
My kids ease stress by sitting in front of a video screen blasting Nazis, zombies or even Nazi zombies. None of those works for me.
Instead, I buy a cheap pair of ear buds, plug them into my computer and download an MP3 of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings," the saddest song ever written. That haunting classical melody was pumping through my brain recently as I wrote a rather upbeat column about the stress caused by some minor household mishaps.
I suppose there was a time when I would have sought to relax by listening to a more energetic song - maybe even "Relax," by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, or the Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" song about the guy who is "tense and nervous" and can't sleep because his "bed's on fire." But on that day, Barber's "Adagio for Strings" pushed all the right buttons to relieve my stress.
I mellow out to a helping of Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" as I hunker down to write this column.
If music hath powers to soothe the savage breast, it surely can melt away some stress.
Combine stress-relieving tunes with scenes of tall ships, desert flowers, butterflies, autumn scenes, lighthouses, waterfalls and cute animals and you've got "a beacon of hope in a troubled world," proclaims Wayne Anderson of the Above the Clouds division of ImageCrafters in Naperville.
Anderson, 62, retired after a long career in sales with the airlines industry and invested his retirement in two series of inspiration DVDs called "Senior Serenity" and "The Way of Nature."
"With senior citizens, it provokes something in their memory that gets them to talk," says Anderson, who lives with his daughter and granddaughter in Elgin. "The younger set, it just relaxes them and puts them to sleep."
This isn't exactly the career path Anderson envisioned when he retired early to become the next Walt Disney, He hoped to teach kids valuable life lessons through his animated adventures of "Paula Koala."
"I followed my dream and my dream didn't hit," says Anderson. He found a new dream to pursue after his mother moved into an assisted-living complex where residents quickly tired of television offerings featuring dysfunctional families fighting.
"She told me they were scrounging around for old videos of 'I Love Lucy,'" Anderson says. In an effort to entertain his mom and the other older people, Anderson put together his first DVD of soothing music and photographs of nature.
"They really related to this," says Anderson, who used a lot of photographs and videos from his own travels. "If there was a butterfly display in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I'd film it. I took a week and just drove around the Great Lakes and photographed all the lighthouses and tall ships and stuff like that."
Through his www.imagecraftersmedia.com Web site, Anderson hopes to sell his "Senior Serenity" DVDs to senior centers, nursing homes and medical waiting rooms, and his "The Way of Nature" DVDs to Baby Boomers looking for stress-busters.
"I think there's a real need, not for escapism, but to get back to the natural values we forgot about," says Anderson, who sprinkles his DVDS with inspiration quotations. "I believe in the cause. I think it's the way to go."
If it's not, he might want to give a listen to Barber's "Adagio for Strings."