Nobody likes too much tension, do they? When things pile up, and you can’t get a break, it’s unbearable. Modern life seems so filled with tension – what with our jobs, raising families, commuting to work, paying the bills – it’s too much!
On the other hand, dealing with tension – facing challenges – is invigorating, right?
On a stringed musical instrument, without tension, the strings couldn’t make any noise at all!
I guess the secret to avoiding undue stress from tension, is to have a sense of being in control of the tension. A busy day at work is not a bad day, so long as you’re feeling like you’re in front of the challenges the day is throwing at you. And that feeling is affected by a lot of factors – the nature of the issues, the seriousness of the issues and of course, how you’re feeling that day.
In music and in art, tension is a wonderful technique to perk up the senses. In a painting, tension can be created by the use of color, or as a compositional element. In DaVinci’s “Last Supper”, Judas’ raised index finger creates tension that breaks up the visual cacophony and competes with the otherwise horizontal orientation of the work – your eye is drawn to it.
In music, a kind of tension is created simply by chord changes. Musicians talk of “resolving” a chord pattern, which usually means bringing the pattern back to the root chord, which relieves tension. But some songs inject a little tension by refusing to resolve, they may end the pattern on an unexpected chord. Like any tension, this can be interesting or annoying – depending on the skill of the artist, and the individual listener’s taste.
I think it’s pretty impossible to never feel the effects of unwanted tension in life – who can control what comes at you, day by day and year by year? How you learn to deal with the tension – dissolve it, re-assign it, ignore it, or otherwise deflect it, may be the key to happiness or inner peace.
Some folks are really good at this, and swear by their methods, claiming to always have inner peace. I doubt that is often true – there are too many tension attack vectors, and so many external things influence our ability to apply stress-reducing techniques. But I do think people that have habits and temperaments that aid in dealing with (and even exploiting tension) have a recipe for true happiness and contentment.
Lesson one, learn how to enjoy bluegrass music.
