Life is full of stressors, big and small.
I think it's the small stressors that add up to make our lives more difficult.
One small thing that really stresses me out – okay it's very tiny, minuscule, impossible to see without an electron microscope.
It happens when I approach an intersection on foot to cross the street.
The light is green and those numbers telling you how much time you have to cross are counting down. That's it. That's what gives my nervous system a little nudge. Over and over again. Each time taking a few seconds off my lifespan due to stress.
As soon as I look up and see the numbers crunching, 8-7-6, my brain automatically tries to calculate how many steps I walk per second, how many seconds are left and will I make it. Since my brain is distracted with the math, and not doing a good job, I lose focus and trip. Another 2 seconds lost.
Will I cross in time? Or will I get a free ride on the hood of a TTC bus? Worse still, will I be 1/27th of the way through the intersection and have to pull back, looking silly and awkward (and lousy at math).
Don't we get enough information in this world?
I watched the surgery channel the other day. A doctor was delicately routing his way through a man's brain who had a stroke.
What I didn't see was a little clock counting each and every second he had left to dig around in the brain before he caused another stroke, or erased the man's personality, or before the brain caught a cold.
Imagine if everything we did was counted by the second. You now have 15 seconds before you get diarrhea from eating at Red Lobster. 14-13-12.…I guess that's good to know, but not in the car. Maybe you could have held it a little longer, but the clock says no.
You are having sex. You now have 12 seconds before you lose your erection. Of course, once a man is told that pressure-filled information, the erection deflates immediately, looking much like the Hindenburg's ill-fated trip. No need to continue the count down, thank you.
See what I mean?
Then it occurred to me. Perhaps a pedometer would help. Maybe I could pair it via bluetooth with the lights and it would tell me the size and number of steps needed to safely cross.
I could pick an intersection and cross continuously until I got the numbers right. Would that look silly?
Writing this post has erased 3 minutes from my lifetime. See what I give up to entertain the world?
HELLOOOO NEWMAN: Laughter is your sixth sense
