Coping with Stress

"When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully, "remarked Samuel Johnson...A major catastrophe that frustrates the goal of life will either destroy the self, forcing the person to use all his psychic energy to erect a barrier around remaining goals, defending them against further onslaughts of fate; or it will provide a new more clear, and more urgent goal: to overcome the challenges created by the defeat. If the second road is taken, the tragedy is not necessarily a detriment to the quality of life...Even the loss of one of the most basic human faculties, like that of sight, does not mean that a person's consciousness need become impoverished; the opposite is often what happens. But what makes the difference? How does it come about that the same blow will destroy one person, while another will transform it into inner order?..." Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi