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Back in the good old days of economic —in 1950s and 1960s—a person could to do something new, and in life but could also choose to say, “That’s not for me: I am going to it safe in life. I am going to stay in my hometown and have a nice comfortable in a salaried job.” for the vast majority of Americans. over the next 10 years whether we like it or not, and .__.

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Lighten Your Load and Save Your LifeIf you often feel angry and overwhelmed, like the stress in your life is spinning out of control, then you may be hurting your heart. If you don't want to break your own heart, you need to learn to take charge of your life where you can—and recognize there are many things beyond your control. So says Dr. Robert S. Eliot, author of a new book titled From Stress to Strength: How to Lighten Your Load and Save Your Life. He's a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Nebraska. Eliot says there are people in this world that he calls "hot reactors". Eliot says researchers have found that stressed people have higher cholesterol levels, among other things. "We've done years of work in showing that excess alarm or stress chemicals can literally burst heart muscle fibers. When that happens it happens very quickly, within five minutes. The heart beats like a bag of worms instead of a pump. And when that happens, we can't live." Eliot, 64, suffered a heart attack at age 44. He attributes some of the cause to stress. For years he was a "hot reactor". He's now doing very well. The main predictors of destructive levels of stress are the FUD factors—fear, uncertainty and doubt—together with perceived lack of control, he says. For many people, the root of their stress is anger, and the trick is to find out where the anger is coming from. "Does the anger come from a feeling that everything must be perfect?" Eliot asks. "That's very common in professional women. They think, 'I should, I must, I have to.' Good enough is never good enough. Perfectionists cannot delegate. They get angry that they have to carry it all, and they blow their tops. " "Others are angry because they have no compass in life. And they give the same emphasis to a traffic jam that they give a family argument," he says. "If you are angry for more than five minutes—if you stir the anger within you and let it build with no safety outlet—you have to find out where it's coming from." "What happens is that the hotter people get, physiologically, with mental stress, the more likely they are to blow apart with some heart problem." One step to calming down is to recognize you have this tendency. Eliot recommends taking charge of your life. "If there is one word that should be substituted for stress, it's control. " "You have to decide what parts of your life you can control," he says. "Stop where you are on your trail and say, 'I'm going to get my compass out and find out what I need to do.' " He suggests that people write down the six things in their lives that they feel are the most important things they'd like to achieve. Ben Franklin did it at age 32. " " Eliot says you can first make a list of 12 things, then cut it down to 6 and set your priorities. "Don't give yourself impossible things, but things that will affect your identity, control and self-worth." "Put them on a note card and take it with you and look at it when you need to. Since we can't create a 26-hour day we have to decide what things we're going to do." Keep in mind that over time these priorities are going to change. " " From Eliot's viewpoint, the other key to controlling stress is to "realize that there are other troublesome parts of your life over which you can have little or no control—like the economy and politicians". You have to realize that sometimes with things like traffic jams, deadlines and unpleasant bosses, " "

Weeping for My Smoking DaughterMy daughter smokes. While she is doing her homework, her feet on the bench in front of her and her calculator clicking out answers to her geometry problems, I am looking at the half-empty package of Camels tossed carelessly close at hand. My heart feels terrible. I want to weep. In fact, I do weep a little, standing there by the stove holding one of the instruments, so white, so precisely rolled, that could cause my daughter's death. She doesn't know this, but it was Camels that my father, her grandfather, smoked. But before he smoked cigarettes made by manufacturers—when he was very young and very poor, with glowing eyes—he smoked Prince Albert tobacco in cigarettes he rolled himself. By the late forties and early fifties no one rolled his own anymore (and few women smoked) in my hometown of Eatonton,Georgia. He never looked as fashionable as Prince Albert, though; he continued to look like a poor, overweight, hard-working colored man with too large a family, black, with a very white cigarette stuck in his mouth. I do not remember when he started to cough. Perhaps it was unnoticeable at first, a little coughing in the morning as he lit his first cigarette upon getting out of bed. It was not unusual for him to cough for an hour. My father died from "the poor man's friend", pneumonia, one hard winter when his lung illnesses had left him low. I doubt he had much lung left at all, after coughing for so many years. He had so little breath that, during his last years, he was always leaning on something. Near the very end of his life, and largely because he had no more lungs, he quit smoking. He gained a couple of pounds, but by then he was so slim that no one noticed. When I travel to Third World countries I see many people like my father and daughter. In these poor countries, as in American inner cities and on reservations, money that should be spent for food goes instead to the tobacco companies; over time, people starve themselves of both food and air, effectively weakening and hooking their children, eventually killing themselves. I read in the newspaper and in my gardening magazine that the ends of cigarettes are so poisonous that if a baby swallows one, it is likely to die, and that the boiled water from a bunch of them makes an effective insecticide. There is a deep hurt that I feel as a mother. I remember how carefully I ate when I was pregnant, how patiently I taught my daughter how to cross a street safely. For what, I sometimes wonder; so that she can struggle to breathe through most of her life feeling half her strength, and then die of self-poisoning, as her grandfather did? There is a quotation from a battered women's shelter that I especially like: "Peace on earth begins at home." I think of a quotation for people trying to stop smoking: "Every home is a no-smoking zone." Smoking is a form of self-battering that also batters those who must sit by, occasionally joke or complain, and helplessly watch. I realize now that as a child I sat by, through the years, and literally watched my father kill himself:

Marriage Across NationsGail and I imagined a quiet wedding. During our two years together we had experienced the usual ups and downs of a couple learning to know, understand, and respect each other. Our racial and cultural differences enhanced our relationship and taught us a great deal about tolerance, compromise, and being open with each other. Gail sometimes wondered why I and other blacks were so involved with the racial issue, and I was surprised that she seemed to forget the subtler forms of racial hatred in American society. Gail and I had no illusions about what the future held for us as a married, mixed couple in America. We wanted to avoid the mistake made by many couples of marrying for the wrong reasons, and only finding out ten, twenty, or thirty years later that they were incompatible, that they hardly took the time to know each other, that they overlooked serious personality conflicts in the expectation that marriage was an automatic way to make everything work out right. When Gail spread the news of our wedding plans to her family she met with some resistance. Her mother, Deborah, all along had been supportive of our relationship, and even joked about when we were going to get married so she could have grandchildren. "So it was all right for me to date him, but it's wrong for me to marry him. Is his color the problem, Mom?" Gail subsequently told me she had asked her mother."To start with I must admit that at first I harbored reservations about a mixed marriage, prejudices you might even call them. But when I met Mark I found him a charming and intelligent young guy. Any mother would be proud to have him for a son-in-law. Yes, my friends talk. Some even express shock at what you are doing. But they live in a different world. So you see, Mark's color is not the problem. When we met I saw him as my beloved, intelligent, charming, and caring. It was all so new, all so exciting, and we both thought, on the surface at least, that ours was an ideal marriage with every indication that it would last forever. I realized only later that I didn't know my beloved, your father, very well when we married.""But Mark and I have been together more than two years," Gail railed. "We've been through so much together. We've seen each other at our worst many times. " "You may be right. But I still think that waiting won't hurt. You're only twenty-five." Gail's father, David, whom I had not yet met personally, approached our decision with a father-knows-best attitude. He basically asked the same questions as Gail's mother: "Why the haste? Who is this Mark? What's his citizenship status?" "But Dad, that's harsh," Gail said. "Then why the rush?" he asked repeatedly. "Mark has had problems with citizenship before and has always taken care of them himself," Gail defended. " " Her father proceeded to quote statistics showing that mixed couples had higher divorce rates than couples of the same race and gave examples of mixed couples he had counseled who were having marital difficulties. "Have you thought about the hardships your children could go through?" he asked. "Dad, are you a racist?" "No, of course not. But you have to be realistic." "Maybe our children will have some problems, but whose children don't? But one thing they'll always have: our love and devotion." "That's idealistic. People can be very cruel toward children from mixed marriages." "Dad, we'll worry about that when the time comes. " "Remember, it's never too late to change your mind."

Time-Conscious AmericansAmericans believe no one stands still. This attitude results in a nation of people committed to researching, experimenting and exploring. Time is one of the two elements that Americans save carefully, the other being labor."We are slaves to nothing but the clock," it has been said. Time is treated as if it were something almost real. We budget it, save it, waste it, steal it, kill it, cut it, account for it; we also charge for it. It is a precious resource. Many people have a rather acute sense of the shortness of each lifetime. We want every minute to count.A foreigner's first impression of theUSis likely to be that everyone is in a rush—often under pressure. City people always appear to be hurrying to get where they are going, restlessly seeking attention in a store, or elbowing others as they try to complete their shopping. Working time is considered precious. Others in public eating-places are waiting for you to finish so they, too, can be served and get back to work within the time allowed. You also find drivers will be abrupt and people will push past you. You will miss smiles, brief conversations, and small exchanges with strangers. This is because people value time highly, and they resent someone else "wasting" it beyond a certain appropriate point.Many new arrivals in the States will miss the opening exchanges of a business call, for example. They will miss the ritual interaction that goes with a welcoming cup of tea or coffee that may be a convention in their own country. They may miss leisurely business chats in a restaurant or coffee house. Normally, Americans do not assess their visitors in such relaxed surroundings over extended small talk; much less do they take them out for dinner, or around on the golf course while they develop a sense of trust. Time is, therefore, always ticking in our inner ear.Consequently, we work hard at the task of saving time. We produce a steady flow of labor-saving devices; we communicate rapidly through faxes, phone calls or emails rather than through personal contacts, which though pleasant, take longer—especially given our traffic-filled streets. To us the impersonality of electronic communication has little or no relation to the significance of the matter at hand. In some countries no major business is conducted without eye contact, requiring face-to-face conversation. However, people are meeting increasingly on television screens, conducting "teleconferences" to settle problems not only in this country but also—by satellite—internationally.TheUSis definitely a telephone country. Almost everyone uses the telephone to conduct business, to chat with friends, to make or break social appointments, to say "Thank you", to shop and to obtain all kinds of information. This is due partly to the fact that the telephone service is superb here, whereas the postal service is less efficient.Some new arrivals will come from cultures where it is considered impolite to work too quickly. Assignments are, consequently, given added weight by the passage of time. In theUS, however, it is taken as a sign of skillfulness or being competent to solve a problem, or fulfill a job successfully, with speed.