About twenty years ago, a friend and I took a trip to the Mideast, and the trip ended in Egypt — first Cairo, then Luxor, and then back to Cairo again before heading home. Of all the places in the world I've been to date, Egypt has got to be at the top of the list. At the same time, Egypt was also one of the poorest countries I had ever visited. The people had very little. There were a lot of mud-brick houses and a lot of unpaved, dusty streets. In the evenings, the streets were lined with young men in caftans sitting beneath the lamp posts, doing their homework or studying. They had no electricity at home. Regardless of their apparent poverty, the Egyptians, in general, appeared to be the happiest population in the world. They didn't consider themselves to be victims. Life, in its simplicity, was evidently good.
You might think, at first, that people like the Egyptian population who lived in what we would consider abject poverty would be be frantic to achieve a higher standard of living. You'd have another think coming, though. Even I, a stranger among them, could sense their satisfaction with what they had. The poor are generally not the most frazzled. On the contrary: that dubious honor would be reserved for the more successful among us.
What are the reasons behind this rather odd phenomenon? After all, according to Abraham Maslow, the more urgent your needs are at the bottom of his hierarchy (physical needs, safety and security needs, etc.), the fewer resources are available for reaching the higher realms of the hierarchy (like cultural, artistic, creative and spiritual needs). So, shouldn't those who are eking out a subsistence at the bottom of the pyramid be the more stressed-out? After all, their very lives are on the line!
Consider this: once your basic needs have been met, you gain the benefit of having unstructured time that's available for fulfilling your wants. Needs sustain you where you are in life; wants move you forward. Here's the clincher: a want, once it's been fulfilled, becomes a need. Remember that statement, because there's where you find your stressors. The more you have accomplished, the more pressure you experience to maintain your quality of life. To say it in other words, the more successful you are, the more frazzled you become. In this light, your choices become starkly obvious: either deal with it, or simplify your life.
It's been important to me to work as a life coach with successful people, not because I'm an elitist, but because they're the ones who can most profit from my services. As I experienced in Cairo, just because you're poor doesn't mean that you're miserable. Likewise, just because you're successful doesn't mean you're going to be happy. Many times, the opposite is true. You might think of that whenever you're tempted to envy the so-called 'rich and powerful' — those whose success has put them in the limelight. Many are those who can find contentment in poverty; few are those who find it in wealth and influence.
One last story before I go. I had often heard of the 'sword of Damocles,' and I knew it meant an imminent threat, but I never knew the story until this past week. It seems that Damocles was loudly envious of King Dionysius of Syracuse. Tired of his envy, Dionysius seated Damocles in his own seat at a sumptuous banquet held in his honor. But Damocles was unable to enjoy his moment in the spotlight because Dionysius had suspended a sword over Damocles' seat, hanging by a mere thread. He learned the lesson from the King that wealth and power are precarious, and be-frazzlement is often the price that has to be paid for success. That's a lesson that serve us all well to learn.
H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown
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