Probably the last thing Bruce Elliott saw was the image of his own face, absurdly bearded in white aerosol cream. He was shaving in the bathroom mirror. As always, Elliott was in a hurry. A cup of coffee and a half-eaten bagel sat on the counter, and he could hear his three kids loudly testing his wife's patience in the kitchen. It was 7:20 a.m., and he already had a headache.

The doctors later conjectured that he likely felt a brief, blinding pain just before his head exploded. Aneurism was their polite term. Regardless, he was dead in an instant of a violent cerebral hemorrhage. A man who looked otherwise fit, was not overweight, did not smoke, and drank moderately was dead at the age of 42. Dead of stress.

Stress is a paradox. It has the power to enhance life as well as end it. Systemically, it serves the human organism as both a stimulant and an indicator. In manageable doses, stress is the body's response to threat or challenge. It is a messenger that spurs us to confront or retreat from sources of external pressure. In excessive doses, it indicates an imbalance, producing a litany of physical symptoms that signal "system overload."

Think of it as a violin string: too little tension, and the music is lifeless and dull; too much tension, and the music is shrill and grating. Apply too much tension for too long, and the string snaps.

Increasingly, the demands of high-stress, high-tech jobs are leaving a tangle of broken strings across the corporate landscape. Job stress is estimated to cost our nation's businesses up to $80 billion per year, or roughly $750 per individual worker. While business refers to these losses in the bloodless vernacular of "reduced productivity," "increased absenteeism," or "accelerating healthcare costs," tallying economic disruption alone does not speak to the physical and emotional cost borne by individuals and their families. During my last year with IBM, of the fifteen or so people working in a shrinking, remote branch office in the Northwest, one was divorced, one barely survived a massive coronary, one had triple-bypass surgery, and another had half a cancerous lung removed. For these individuals, the price of surviving the next round

of layoffs was the death of a relationship and clashes with their own mortality. Unarguably, the seeds of illness have many origins, but they are all nurtured by stress.

The combination of job demands and corporate machismo dictates that stress is best addressed by masking its symptoms. Thus, when stress manifests in the body as insomnia, anxiety, chronic weariness, headaches, panic attacks, depression, irritability, high blood pressure, or pain, sufferers routinely indulge in misguided attempts at self-medication. Got a headache? Take a pill. Stomach killing you? Reach for chalky, pink relief. Had a tough day? Down a stiff drink.

Swallowable solutions to stress are unlikely, however, to allay its root causes. Research suggests that job stress is caused by mind-numbing repetitive work, absence of creativity or control, low job satisfaction, lack of recognition (most often reported by men), frequent interruptions (most often reported by women), authoritarian management, time constraints, harassment, and lack of meaningful personal interaction. Research, I think, misses the point. I believe there is an underlying matter that is the causal agent for many of the above complaints, and it is simply this: Millions of people are willing to work endlessly at jobs for which they have no passion.

Lack of passion inevitably equates to lack of energy-not having enough energy to handle the day-to-day irritations that would seem trivial if work fed the soul as well as the wallet. There is a profound difference between being fully employed and fully engaged. (In fact, many employed people aren't engaged at all.) In my experience, lack of meaningful engagement over a long period of time causes racking stress. The ergonomic office cubicle becomes no better than a cage when there is a fundamental disconnection between what the mind is directed to do and what the spirit yearns for. Draining life energy in support of something that does not reenergize, that neither fulfills nor inspires, and that lacks a creative channel is, I believe, the source of much of the world's misery. It is Thoreau's "quiet desperation" that rides the backs of the unengaged and infects their lives outside the office. From the standpoint of well-being-of the human spirit-it is more important to be fully engaged than fully employed.

Work, itself, is a neutral event. For many, the primary job stress is the disparity between what they really feel about their work and what they profess to feel in order to keep doing it. There is a price to pay for not aligning behind our true beliefs. That so many people suffer from chronic "dis-ease" is testament to their determination to simply live with the symptoms and soldier on.

The cheerless fact is this: If you don't like your job, your job doesn't care, and toughing it out will not improve it. Where stress is concerned, consider this useful axiom: What you ignore persists, and what persists will get bigger. The messages-in the form of symptoms-will get increasingly louder until you act to alleviate the stress or, in the extreme, become ill or collapse. I worked with Bruce Elliott at a company in Silicon Valley. I watched him struggle in a passionless job. "Just a few more years," he told me. He was doing it for his family, he said. His death cemented my decision to leave the corporate world and to pursue my passion, writing. It was a decision that I believe saved my life.

For many years, I endured the stress of working at a succession of jobs that fed my body but not my soul. I did it in part because I was afraid to risk and in part because I was supporting a lifestyle. As I moved up in salary and position, I began to link my identity and self-worth to my job, and enduring the accompanying stress was less threatening than the loss of that identity. In order to survive, I adopted an unhealthy pretense (one that I suspect many share) that what I and

my employers were doing was really important when, for me, it clearly was not. A decade would pass before I discovered that I was not my job.

When I heard of Elliott's death, I remember feeling terribly frightened. For years, my body had been sending me messages that I, of course, ignored. I closed my office door and took stock. It wasn't easy to admit, but I had become perpetually tense, vaguely resentful, and uniformly unsuccessful in my intimate relationships. (As I would later discover, shutting down passion in one area of my life impacted other areas.) My blood pressure was high, and the only emotion I could feel with any regularity was irritation. It wasn't much of a stretch to see myself dead on the bathroom floor.

I recalled something I had heard a teacher say long ago: There are only two things you need to understand if you want to be happy. First, that you have to find your passion. Second, that you have a limited amount of time to do it. The latter point, having just been brought home with jarring precision, made me resolve-as Michael Jackson advised-to look at the man in the mirror and make a change.

The first step in that process was to get honest with myself: to acknowledge where I was, how I kept myself stuck there, and where I truly wanted to be. For the first time in years, I asked myself what I wanted. What were my values? How did I want to live? In what cause was I willing to invest my life force?

The answers to those questions led me to develop a vision, detailed and specific, of where I wanted to live, what kind of work I was willing to do, how much free time I wanted, and how I aspired to be in the world. The more precise the vision, I found, the easier it was to attain.

In the meantime, I resolved to deal with the symptoms of the stress. Exercise was my favorite method. Learning to breathe correctly was also enormously beneficial. (Most people breathe very shallowly into the top of the chest. The correct method is to breathe deeply into the belly.) One
of the best things I ever did was getting rid of my television, an addiction ironically often thought to relieve stress. But so much on television is violence and vulgarity in the service of commercialism that watching TV was like being plugged into a toxic waste stream connected directly to my brain. Further, it robbed me of my only irreplaceable asset, my time. In any event, it made no sense to combat spirit-numbing work with spirit-numbing television.

There are, of course, many other suggestions for stress reduction-from taking micro-breaks during the day to refresh yourself, to practicing meditation. In all of these, however, I found only temporary relief. Nothing really changed until I changed.

Once I resolved to do that, magic happened. Within three years, I left Silicon Valley, moved to Oregon, bought my first home and some land, left my job, and found opportunities to write. Subsequently, I also married.

No, my income isn't what it used to be, but, paradoxically, I feel a much richer man. Eleven years later, I am still deliriously happy, and going back is unimaginable. Yes, of course, there is still stress in my life, but, staying with the violin string analogy, it now only serves to make the music sweeter.

After spending 17 years stuffing his passion, Victor emerged insufferably happy, fully engaged,

and writing in Oregon.

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