This morning, I was fully prepared to write about...something. Then I saw the news. American Airlines Flight 587, with 255 people on board, crashed into the Queens borough of New York City. Whatever had been rattling around in my brain until then was gone.

This stuff is getting too personal, too close for many of us. A week ago, I was on an American Airlines flight coming home from a seminar.

And it gets even closer. Just before the weekend, on Friday, I got a panicked call from my parents. They live in Florida and had been listening to the news. They were shocked when they heard reports of Anthrax being found in the little tiny post office in Rocky Hill, New Jersey. That's our post office. It's a tiny storefront in the base of a tiny building, all in this little, one-square-mile picturesque rural suburb of Princeton. And, apparently, some few spores of Anthrax had reached our quaint burg.

News upon news upon news. It's enough to make you crazy.

The economy's down, terrorists are blowing things up, wackos are mailing Anthrax-filled envelopes, planes are crashing, unemployment is up, and the stress is getting to us all.

I can't tell you what's going to happen. I can't tell you if things will get better or worse. But I can tell you that I, like so many others, have been giving the events of the last few months a lot of thought. And I've reached a few, simple conclusions: we have to go on with our lives, and we have to learn to manage stress.

We have to go on with our lives. We can take a few moments off to grieve, to think, and to process, but we have to go on with our lives. We have to continue to write, program, sell, eat, love, design, buy, and do all those things that make up the tapestry of life. No matter how weird the world is, we're in it, it keeps moving, and so must we.

How we move through it, though, is where there's room for growth. I'd hate to assume that there's going to be more and more stressful events, but it's a reasonable guess. We can either let each event knock us back, make us hurt more, make us weaker, or we can learn how to honor the event and let it flow over us.

There's no doubt. Stress makes you stupid, and it makes you sick. So there's no doubt it's best for your body and your soul if you can learn to manage the stress, help your body and your mind chill out. In fact, I advocate learning. Much as you'd learn to use a new software program, you can learn to use tools that can help you reduce stress. I'm going to talk about a few of them here.