The Cure For Stress Is Savoring Cordite and Cherry Blossoms

Wisdom from WWI trench soldiers

Albert Bierstadt. A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie. 1866.

The signalers of WWI kept communication lines running at all costs as bullets, bombs, and low-crawling enemy soldiers cut them rain or shine, sun or moon.

One young Irish infantryman noted these warriors had a tendency to laugh: “They possessed a very high morale, and they preserved the romantic aspect of the war.”¹

Let us paint the scene for our mind’s eye: three pairs of men in wool coats and black boots stand in no-mans-land. They hold spools of telephone wire leading into the muddy trenches behind them. Dull thuds from mortar rounds drown out their whistling and send plumes of sludge and bloody-water skyward in what was once a green vineyard. The men do not look up. They were the first to walk onto no-mans-land prior to the days assault, and will be the last to walk off when the assault is over. Suddenly, their Irish tune is cut short by a mortar round exploding a few feet away from one of the pairs. Two men are launched airborne and land in a watery bomb crater. The other pairs turn their eyes to the scene, wires dangling from their mittened hands. When the two men slowly rise to their feet with muffled curses, the other pairs laugh and pick up their ditty. The iron mortars continue to fall from the blue sky above.

The stress they must have felt is hard to comprehend, and thus our irony is epic: we find men in this industrialized version of hell laughing while white balls of fire spit slivers of shrapnel at them, and yet in unprecedented peace and ease we find not laughter but anxiety.

Why might this be? How can reactions to stress and stressors be so different? What does it mean for you and I?

Let us commence our assault.

Primal hardship looks like a lion attacking a hunter-gatherer on the savannah or a fire team blitzing a room lit with muzzle flashes on a hostage rescue mission. It is an ultra-intense but short-lived stress, a blip amid a life of training. This primal stress says, “I will hammer you without mercy and then allow you time to reflect. Do with it what you will.” This mode is small unit, violent, and conducted with weapons of wood, bone, stone, and metal. I think of this as an ancient and baseline human mode of life.

Modern ease looks like a hand convulsively groping for a vibrating phone, red notifications on Instagram (or Substack), unread emails, standstill traffic, painted lines on the street, fanatically biased news casters weaving tales of doom, and low-engagement to-do lists a machine should probably be doing. It is chronic and mid-level stress. This stress says, “I will creep into the caverns of your subconscious. I will warp your dreams, eat away at your REM sleep, and tear your eyes away from the trees and stars and bend them inward to gaze in horror upon your anxiety.” This mode happens in the state amid wondrous technologies, peace, and prosperity.

But there exists a third mode, the evil twin of modernity, its false and monstrous attempt to fill the void of ease with a return to primal hardship.

We can call it modern hardship: it looks like two-bit tyrants seeking world domination, a wall of metal bullets tattering skin and camouflage, and a muddy strip of scorched earth laced with rusty bits of barbed wire. It is chronic and high-level stress. This stress says, “I will test the capacity of your ancient cerebral matter and its windows to the world: ears, nose, eyes. I am death from above—iron bombs. I am death from below—poison gas.” Like modern ease, it too is a product of the state, but its technology amplifies the war-tools of primal hardship leaving us with an apocalyptic level of violence and oppression.

Modern hardship pulverizes millions of sacks of flesh, blood, and bone into soil or red clouds of vapor whereas ease does not—this makes our signalers humor even more profound.

What, then, is under the signalers control? Mortars? No. Bullets? No. A screaming charge of bayonets? No. Our signalers may have thought, “If I panic, the bombs will rain. If I laugh, the bombs will continue to rain. So why not laugh?” And thus they laughed.

The huddle of men around a howitzer want to kill me and this wakes me up. As wretched as it is, it centers me. I make sure I take the time to pause and savor the scent of cherry blossoms on the breeze. I sip metallic-tasting water from my canteen as if it were a gift from God. I devote my mental energies to showing my enemy how pathetic his efforts are to break my soul and I cherish a savage pleasure in saying No to them.

But if both bombs and glowing screens are outside our control, why are responses so radically different? It is because concrete stressors in hardship feel like us-versus-them while abstract stressors in ease feel like us-versus-us. It is because wood, bone, stone, and metal give us the chance to fortify ourselves as we crouch in a foxhole until the crack of bullets comes to end, while blue lights, ring tones, and erratic thumbing back and forth between three different apps disconnects us from ourselves by crawling into the foxhole right alongside us. It is because the stressors of ease are not out there in the enemies trench but feel as though they are in here as part of us. It is because they feel as though they are under our control—we cannot answer the bullet, but we can answer the phone when we are sitting with our families.

And so our misguided agency with the most undeadly stressors brings the death of laughter.

What then?

The logic of the mind says ease is sacred; the logic of events says the mind is insane. Zero stress is death. Anxious stress is submission. Laughing stress is divine. Stress—when owned and trained for—is the gift of self-armament.

The lifeblood of primal and modern hardship is this: training. Training is the panacea, the cure of all ills. It is the Point of Life. Our hunter-gatherers trained for spikes of primal hardship they knew were inevitable and this gave their lives meaning. What is striking about our signalers is they trained themselves to thrive at the apex of industrial suffering without rest, without self-pity, and without losing their sense of humor.

The significant point is our signalers went one step further than our ancestors, and we can go one step further than our signalers.

We can create a perfect equilibrium in a fourth mode I have not yet come up with a name for, but it will be a savage sounding name. The crucial point is we do not need to wait to craft this equilibrium in response to the “must” of hardship and war with its spit, sweat, and blood, but we can do so amid the fruits of peace and ease by treating ease as if it were a trench fight.

We can create an equilibrium capable of ratcheting down every threat outside our skulls to match the command within our skulls. An equilibrium capable of retaining its calm and laughter whether flowing through primal hardship with its bone blades and screaming savages, modern ease with its blue lights and tales of doom, or modern hardship with its tanks and poison gas, world after world neither denting it nor dimming our reverence for every second of life we have been given.

What is left but to train mind and muscle for hell with a laugh? To find the divine in the scent of cherry-blossoms and cordite? To own our task on this earth as an anchor of our equilibrium, whether spooling a bit of wire while whistling beneath the mortars, writing with an ever-so-silky gel pen on a pleasingly soft legal pad, hammering a treehouse onto an oak, or simply savoring the fight?

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See you for the next essay on Tuesday.

1. Lucy, John F. There's a Devil in the Drum. Naval & Military Press, 2001.​