Recently, I signed up for a course increativity led by National Chengchih University advertising professor Chen Wen-ling; all my classmates were also media veterans. One class involved "dark shadow" training, in which each student had to act out the role of the person they most dislike or who makes them feel most stressed out. Half the students chose a co-worker: some are bossy and push you around, some suck up to you to your face, then stab you in the back when you're not around, some spread gossip and delight in making others look bad....

An even more entertaining class was "Fantasy Day." For ten minutes, each person could simply be themselves, without regard to the opinions of others. One classmate acted like an unmoving stone that endures through wind and rain; another wrapped herself up tight like a mummy and squeezed into a cardboard box; another pretended to be a lazy panda lolling about without a care in the world; and another hoped for an invisibility cloak, coming out only when it pleased him to play some practical joke.... It turns out we all shared the dream of putting everything down and escaping from reality.

Modern nine-to-fivers find both work and human relationships equally draining, with pressure constantly hovering like a shadow. To relieve stress, everybody tries to learn to relax, taking classes in yoga, meditation, hiking, swimming.... Recreation has become "practical learning." But are you really likely to become more relaxed this way? As if!

The crux of the problem is in the mind. Confucius described himself as a man who "in his eager pursuit of knowledge forgets his food, and who in the joy of its attainment forgets his sorrows, not even perceiving that old age is coming on." And Wang Yung-ching, founder of Formosa Plastics, has said, "Work is the best recreation." People who can throw themselves wholeheartedly into their work and enjoy what they do are really lucky. Alas, we ordinary mortals throw ourselves into our work because we have no choice, all the while thinking how great it would be to be somewhere else. The result of being neither "into it" not "out of it" is--no surprise--anxiety. In fact, the most tiring thing each day is the inner struggle we experience against ourselves.

This reminds me that many leading figures I have interviewed from various fields have one thing in common: they can easily relax. Some can recharge after a busy business day just by doing ten minutes of meditation, while others can nod off and grab some Zs anytime, anywhere. For such people there is only a fine line between work and rest, and they can turn themselves on and off at a moment's notice. They are among the lucky few who don't have to work hard at leisure.

Psychologist Rollo May said that for him creativity and insight often came in sudden bursts when, after working and thinking hard for a long time, he temporarily put everything aside and took a break. On the one hand his conscious mind was relaxed; on the other his subconscious carried on extending the efforts previously invested, and could work more freely. At some magical moment when he was at once relaxed and focused, creativity appeared!

There are many angles from which to approach our main theme for this month--"leisure." Writer Coral Lee read many books and visited many people and places to try to unravel some of the mysteries of this topic, while photographer Chuang Kung-ju showed an impressive ability to come up with great shots even as he was busy having fun in the mountains and by the sea.

Besides leisure, this issue of Taiwan Panorama has a feature related to another way of relieving stress among modern people: "energy products."

Because this subject involves both science and metaphysics, one of the foreign translators who dealt with the feature dismissed it as mumbo-jumbo. This is similar to the criticism that National Taiwan University president Lee Si-chen recently got from various parties because he raised mysterious experiences like "finger-reading" in a speech. Though personally I've never purchased any energy products and don't use them, there's no need to dismiss outright the world of unknown powers. After all, many things aren't covered by science, so leaving those questions open, and allowing them a chance to reveal their significance, is generally a good thing.