ABSTRACT
Stimulation is essential to a healthy life. Without constant stimulus, our senses wither and life is boring. Unrelieved stimulation, however, is stressful. For a stress-free life, we don’t need too much, and we need rests from it. For peaceful but invigorated balance, we need both sameness, predictability, and contrast, stimulus. Psychologists Fiske and Maddi call this ‘difference within sameness’.1 As background ambience, natural settings such as lapping wavelets, dancing leaf-shade patterns, gurgling streams or endlessly reforming clouds combine, calming tempo, the security of a reliably constant world, with the life and delight of sensory stimulation.
