The thumbnail description of an anesthesiologistÕs day is boredom punctuated by panic, occupational problems increasingly common in a declining American economy. Today people toil at two or three jobs trying to pay for unaffordable mortgages plus the gasoline necessary to get to far flung worksites.  Creating balance in your life under such conditions is not simple.

         During periods of hardship we can learn from others who endured difficult times.  Lin Yutang is almost forgotten now, though he was once the best known Chinese writer in the West. Born in 1896, Lin watched China pass from imperial lassitude to civil war to a vicious Japanese invasion engendering further fratricidal civil war, eventually escaping to spend much of his adult life in America.  Particularly despised by MaoÕs   Communist Party, his attempts to fuse classical Chinese thought with Western ideas led to his international best seller of 1937, ÒThe Art of Living.Ó 

         The vicissitudes of historical forgetfulness are such that at a recent exhibition of his art collection at the Metropolitan Museum in NY, virtually nothing was noted of who Lin was or what he wrote.   An effective aphorist, his quotes were once wildly popular.  One example:   ÒBesides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone.  The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.Ó 

         It is hard to rest while under stress.  Many patients now tell me they feel Òtoo tight,Ó that their work has become overwhelming, as with employee cuts they find themselves doing their own and a former colleagueÕs job.  As too much anxiety can rapidly diminish performance, here are two techniques that may give one perspective.

Resting in Space

         The paper on which this newspaper column appears comes from treated cellulose.  That wood fiber itself originates from trees grown in our southern forests or from Quebec, even Finland or South America. Huge chemical plants filter out the pulp while adding hundreds of industrial molecules derived from sources as varied as corn and petroleum, the latter itself formed from long dead plants. 

         Now, let your eyes magnify the image.  Your paper is revealed to be a series of different overlapping plant fibrils placed in a ragged, endless polymer.  Go down one layer.  Now youÕll see dozens of different twining molecules, primarily carbon based, but containing complex, exotic chemicals that twist, turn, spiral and invert. Further down at the atomic level, your ÒsolidÓ paper is revealed as nearly empty space, with massive yet miniscule shells of protons and electrons sitting in vast fields of nothing, as electrons spin like invisible dervishes round them.  At the next level, neutrons, protons and electrons are revealed as quantum mechanical fables, higher order mathematical functions.

         They may sit in small bits of space or, like electrons, periodically orbit the other side of the moon, all existing as probability functions that can operate perfectly both forwards and backwards in time, though in our particular worldview we can only know the past. 

         Go further, and the mathematical probability haze converts into the multidimensional shapes of string theory, where the paltry three dimensions of our sensual world are tiny pieces of ten, twelve, and fourteen dimensional universes, infinite in number and both infinitely great and small, bending and nesting within each other until some crevices push and pull themselves into the peculiar forms of information we call our reality. 

         Even when you donÕt like what youÕre reading, newsprint may be more interesting than you think. And so it is for an equally complex matrix, if viewing this on a computer screen.

Resting in Time

         Perspective also exists in time. How about the place where youÕre reading now.  What was it like ten years ago?  Many office buildings or homes in our region did not exist ten years ago. Was the land lined with asphalt, or was it an empty lot of sand and saw palmetto?

         Now go back fifty years.  Where you sit may have not been earth but seafront, eventually replaced by developersÕ landfill, the stuff that makes up Bird Key and much of our island homes.  Go back a hundred years and chances are no one lived on the spot  where you sit.

         Go back three or four hundred years to the place where you are now. If indeed it was land, it may have been traversed by Indians - crisscrossing the mudflats for edible mollusks or useful herbs.  Look a thousand years before today and the land may have been thick mangrove with hordes of manatees cavorting in the shallows.  Return back ten thousand years, and almost everywhere you look may have been covered by the seas of the Gulf.

         One can go backward or forward in space and time. Visualizing oneÕs place in the world can provide perspective and rest.  It may also give what Lin described as a sense of wonder at the universe and at human life, respites for difficult times.   

Dr. Matthew Edlund practices sleep medicine and psychiatry in Sarasota.  His new book, Designed To Last, is available online. He can be reached at 365-4308 and via his Web site at doctoredlund.com.