Archive for the ‘Coping’ Category

Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.

English poet and playwright William Congreve penned this famous and often misquoted line for his tragedy, The Mourning Bride. That was in 1697 … centuries before anyone conceived of a phonograph, radio, or MP3. But even then people recognized the tremendous influence music could have on human emotions.

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I write a lot of articles about hanging in when life gets tough. Endurance is a gift. If you can just will yourself to outlast the pain, heartache, discouragement, loneliness, confusion, and grief life throws your way, eventually things will get better. Where there is life, there is hope.

Several years ago, I worked with a woman in her 40s who’d always wanted to find her soul mate. She finally met “Mr. Right,” the two were engaged to marry and planning their wedding … when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He left her to fight her cancer battle and die alone. A few days ago I learned of a similar situation, and it brought home the reality that some mountains cannot be moved and cannot be scaled. And some things will not get better in this lifetime. So how can you find comfort when all really is lost?

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It’s said that during his lifetime, singer Frank Sinatra raised more than a billion dollars for charity. He was known for giving benefit concerts to help a variety of worthy causes, once remarking that he was “an overprivileged adult who ought to help underprivileged children.”

Some of his most popular performances were the private ones he gave for friends and acquaintances who’d been admitted to the hospital. The more serious the illness, the more diligent he was about dropping by and singing a tune to make the patients—and anyone else who could hear—feel a little better.

Few of us are blessed with Sinatra’s extraordinary vocal stylings, but he set a good example of the best way to help people who need to be comforted: Give of whatever talents you have.

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Silver skin shining like moon glow, it would have seemed more in place skimming the fast curves of Monaco than crawling the streets of my small American town. The driver saw me staring and noticeably puffed up. We don’t get many Porsches around here, and he was enjoying what he perceived as my vehicle-envy.

I was thinking: DEATH CAR.

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From King David’s ancient psalms lamenting his conflict with son Absalom to artist Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece mural commemorating the 1930s bombing of the Basque town Guernica, human creativity has been inspired by real-life tragedy.

What sets apart portrait painter Samuel Morse isn’t that his life influenced his art, but that the inspiration wasn’t expressed in charcoals, oils, or watercolors but in the invention of a new language.

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She’d just heard from someone she hadn’t seen in years. Naturally, her old friend had asked about her children, specifically her eldest son. “You think everyone knows, then you realize they don’t,” Karla wrote. Her 22-year-old son was killed on New Year’s Eve 2001.

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My niece is about to enter the second grade, but as Robert Fulghum famously noted, she learned everything she needs to know in kindergarten. She learned to share and to play fair. And she expects the universe to support her idea of fairness. So when she lost her plastic duck-topped coffee-stirrer—a souvenir from the previous day’s parade of ducks at the Peabody Hotel—she declared: “That’s not fair!” as though the universe would magically make it reappear.

“What’s not fair?” I asked.

“They took it!” she said of the restaurant staff that had thrown away her prize.

“You left it on the table, and they picked it up with the rest of the trash. Why isn’t that fair?”

Because!

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When Sherry chattered about becoming an actress, like other stereotypical moms in the 1950s, Margot Heimann Duhl told her daughter to focus on becoming a housewife. But necessity had forced Margot off traditional paths. When she’d fled Nazi Germany for America at 17, she’d had to be self-reliant, learning to speak English and working as a dressmaker. And when Sherry’s father, real-estate investor David Duhl, died of a sudden heart attack when she was nine, Margot stepped up again. The grieving widow went to his office and announced she was taking over the family business. On being informed by a male office manager that she couldn’t possibly do that because she didn’t know anything about real estate, she replied, “Teach me. I can do it.”

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For three hours, unemployed auto worker Nelson Jones dumped the contents of his 16th-floor apartment onto the street as crowds watched and a television crew captured the drama for the evening news. When it ended, police charged Jones with littering. As his niece later noted, “Everyone has their off days.”

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Three decades later things have gotten worse. A recent survey of British human-resource execs by Capital Learning and Development finds that two-thirds are worried about their employees burning out from added responsibilities following recession-based layoffs. And the outsourcing provider found more than half those HR execs are concerned extra duties have kept employees from learning new technologies. Their skills are becoming obsolete, which could impede them from fully exploiting any economic recovery.

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