BUCK,BUCK,BUCKET

I believe you get up each morning and pick up your personalized "stress bucket." As you go through the day your bucket gets full. When your bucket is full, what do you do? You dump your bucket.

Mature people have a healthy, productive way of dumping their buckets. They exercise, laugh, meditate, garden or breathe deeply. Immature people simply dump their buckets into someone else's bucket.

Immature people are those people who call a meeting, burst through the door like crazy persons yelling, screaming, and exit feeling so much better. But the immatures leave a room full of people so uptight those attending the meeting won't be able to exhale for a week.

You see the immatures at work, on the highways in the grocery stores and in the airports taking it out on whomever. They dump, feel temporarily better, move on and leave a trail of stressed people strewn in their wake.

Not only do the immatures come off like spoiled children, they are also ineffective. The reason dumping one's buckets into another's doesn't work in the long run was best explained by that distinguished philosopher Forrest Gump. In the movie of the same name, Forrest's friend was throwing rocks in anger at her old house. Forrest looked at her and Gumped: "Sometimes there's not enough rocks."

Lesson:  Your stress is like a boomerang -- it's useless to toss at anyone else.