Tension — Both…and

Sherri Williams MSEd LPC

Published in

Compassionate Together

4 min readFeb 1, 2021

Bike wheel showing handle to adjust tension

Tension is both helpful and unhelpful. Like so many things, the amount and context matter.

Let’s start with a definition from Vocabulary.com:

The noun tension has its Latin roots in tendere, which means to stretch, and tension occurs when something is stretched either physically or emotionally. Strained relations between countries can cause political tensions to rise. You can add tension to a rubber band by stretching it tight. You can release nervous tension by releasing that tension in the rubber band, when you shoot it at your brother.” — Dictionary Definition : Vocabulary.com

This definition leads me to think about a spiral and the tension required to hold the circles in place…to think about the polarity, or opposing forces, that are at work as we move through life — ever moving forward, even though it looks like we are moving backwards. Confusing?

Think about a bus…”The wheels on the bus go round and round…” (sorry, I had to 😉). If you keep your eye on the spoke of a tire, where the air goes in, and follow it as the bus moves forward, it looks like the spoke is moving backwards, but actually, the circular movement — what looks like “backwards” — is in service to the whole moving forward — such is our journey. As long as we’re seeking and do not give up, we are ever moving forward, though the experience can feel and even appear, to be the opposite.

Pause rest but never give up arranged with scrabble letters — Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Another metaphor is a tree and the internal rings showing its age and aging. A tree is every age it’s ever been (just like you and me).

interior image of a tree showing light and dark rings

According to NASA,

These rings can tell us how old the tree is, and what the weather was like during each year of the tree’s life. The light-colored rings represent wood that grew in the spring and early summer, while the dark rings represent wood that grew in the late summer and fall. One light ring plus one dark ring equals one year of the tree’s life.” — Tree rings provide snapshots of Earth’s past climate — Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet (nasa.gov)

Once again, nature supports us in our journey. During the course of our lives, we have many falls, winters, springs, and summers — times of light and times of darkness — all within an accumulation of days that always have both. We get dark rings as we age, reflecting our own wear and tear, tensions past.

In the end, tension comes down to love and fear — the necessary and the unnecessary — competing needs and desires. The need and desire to be safe and secure competing with the need and desire to expand and grow — surviving vs. thriving. Thus, we move like the wheel on the bus as all life around us does the same.

Tension is a great reminder of the “both/and” of life, the nonduality of everything.

Black and white cups of coffee, illustrating yin yang — Photo by Alex on Unsplash

Let’s lean into love as we honor the shadows and darkness within. In “naming and claiming” all of ourselves, we get closer to the truth — closer to the truth revealed in the very nature of salt.

Chemically, table salt consists of two elements, sodium (Na) and chloride (Cl). Neither element occurs separately and free in nature, but are found bound together as the compound sodium chloride. — Nature of Salt (nasa.gov)

Salt reveals the both/and of life, inside ourselves and outside ourselves. Neither sodium nor chloride occurs separately and free. We can not separate the good from the bad — light and darkness — grief and abundance — summer and winter: they occur together. We can, and yet we cannot, “take what we like and leave the rest” when we are talking about this life. There’s not a fatal flaw in the system, per se, but rather flaws in our thinking that reality “should” be different.

There’s always tension: both…and.

Life is designed this way.