By Ogova Ondego
Published August 27, 2023
As you stop at traffic lights on your way to work every morning, you are likely to see a woman with a baby strapped at the back seat of her car and another child, dressed in school uniform, dozing by her side as she is being driven to school. This woman pulls out a comb and starts straightening her hair after which she applies lipstick and other makeup while stalled in the traffic snarl up. Also visible on the back seat is a pile of papers and files she is taking to work.
But what could be more disturbing than the life of six-year-old Rahma whose hands are so full she can hardly make sense of her play time as any normal Grade 1 pupil should? Picked for school at 6:00 AM, she wakes up an hour earlier and remains at school till 4:00 PM. Arriving home and hour later, Rahma has a few minutes to watch cartoons before being given a bath, taking a snack and settling down to do her home work which she completes at 8:00 PM just in time for supper. She is tucked in bed at 9:00 PM for the ritual to continue the following day.
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Whether you be a domestic worker, an office worker or a pre-schooler in today’s fast-paced and stressful world, chances are you, like that catchy poster in a matatu passenger vehicle that says, ‘Our days are so crowded; our hours are so few … There’s so little time and so much to do’, are wishing your day had more time for you to do all the almost overwhelming number of tasks demanding your attention.
You no doubt may have heard of the office messenger who, sensing that he was already two hours late for duty, chose to run alongside his bicycles for 5 kilometres for lacking the time to stop and get on it?
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This reminds me of Pressure Points: How to Survive Your Stress-Filled World, a book by Peter Meadows that describes the people of today as the ‘Now’ Generation whose functional speed is defined by the reach-me-anytime-anywhere mobile phones.
Meadows laments that even with time-saving gadgets like the microwave, computers and automated teller machines, people still do not have any more time on their hands than did their ancestors who did not enjoy these ‘conveniences’. Meadows writes that unlike the latter, today’s people want to have whatever it is they want now rather than later.
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Rushed with numerous tasks and deadlines to be met, today’s people appear to be running from one thing to another. To save time they buy pre-cooked and pre-packed food. Although they eat and drink while walking or working in the hope of saving time, they are unable to do it as, at the end they are still in the woods with little to write home about. And this despite the appearance of being victims of time hurtling through life like a spacecraft.
The goals of Pressure Points: How to Survive Your Stress-Filled World are to help the reader
- make sense of life when it hits the buffers
- keep stress to the minimum
- flourish under pressure, and
- cope when stress becomes distress.
