Stress Relief – for trucks and people
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When I saw Mike Murchison’s collection of photos and the video highlighting the suspension system of this beautiful Kenworth, I laughed out loud reading his title for the photo essay: “Stress Relief.”
What would be the human equivalent, I wondered, of the suspension system on that Kenworth?
To find the answer, I opened Dale Carnegie’s “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living,” still one of the best books ever written to help anyone conquer stress.
“When we stop fighting the inevitable,” Carnegie wrote, “we release energy which enables us to create a richer life.
“No one living has enough emotion and vigor to fight the inevitable and, at the same time, enough left over to create a new life. Choose one or the other. You can bend with the inevitable sleet storms of life, or you can resist them, and break!”
Carnegie describes planting a score of trees on his farm in Missouri: unfortunately, an ice storm hit and the trees, encrusted with ice, “resisted and broke and split under the load.”
“I have travelled hundreds of miles through the evergreen forests of Canada,” he noted, “yet I have never seen a spruce or a pine broken by sleet or ice. These evergreen forests know how to bend, how to bow down their branches, how to co-operate with the inevitable.”
You know before you start out that life’s road will have bumps and potholes; you can’t avoid them. Better to be prepared with the mental suspension system you’ll need to absorb the shocks and bounce back.
–Rita Smith
