Deluxe Tension™
Nothing good has ever come from focusing on step 5 when you’re on step 1
After the deconstruction, reconstruction. It’s a process most of us go through at least a few times in life – and there are a lot of ways it goes wrong.
Ideally, the process goes like this:
I notice a pattern I’ve gotten stuck in, a shape I twisted myself into to please my parents, my teachers, my boss, or some vague sense of Who I Ought To Be. I realize that this shape has become involuntary and maladaptive.
I notice the ways that I’ve been holding that shape together, and I let go of them, bit by bit. I release myself from involuntarily holding that shape.
Finally, I’m able to re-shape myself into something that better suits my life – and hopefully I do it in a way that won’t become involuntary and maladaptive later. I stay aware of how I’m holding that shape, and how I could release it if needed.
It’s not an easy process, but it’s pretty natural and it takes its course if I let it.
The problem comes when I try to avoid that process, and especially the middle “letting go” part of it.
When you’ve been gripping something and holding a shape for so long, it can feel somewhere between impossible and terrifying to let go. Not just to let go of that specific shape, but to let go at all. So many parts of you are convinced that if you’re not “holding yourself together,” you’ll die. Or you’ll become useless, unloveable, unhireable – which pretty much feels the same.
To put off this death and avoid letting go of the shape we’re holding, many try to put on a new shape before letting go of the old one. Rather than letting go of the things that don’t serve us, we just… add new things on top of them, and hope they’ll supplant the originals. We get sick of our old, crappy, cringe tension, so we slap on a coat of new, VIP, deluxe tension.
This doesn’t work for long, but it can work for a while.
Some versions of this are pretty recognizable — like any time someone realizes their life isn’t working, and they latch on to some new framework; they try to superimpose it over their life and constantly reinforce it in every situation.
There’s the new New Ager, not allowing themselves to feel negative feelings, instead constantly reminding themselves to perk up, think positive, manifest a positive co-creation of reality and brush away all negative energy.
There’s the recent Buddhist meditator, stopping every conversation to breathe deeply, center themselves, and soften their eyes before whispering whatever response feels appropriately enlightened enough.
There’s the motivational podcast listener, stopping their friends mid-sentence to remind them “don’t disempower yourself like that, you are a powerful, competent person and you can do anything you set your mind to, don’t let these limiting beliefs hold you back.”
There’s a hundred other flavors. The shared dynamic is that they’re still holding the old, involuntary tensions they’ve built up – they’ve just now added more tensions on top of them to hope they counterbalance and even out. Which they do, sometimes. For awhile. But when you have a brittle system, and you add more brittle tension… that’s how things crack.
It’s the same problem as always: chasing the desire for control, predictability, certainty, and stability is exactly the thing that throws our lives into uncontrollable, unpredictable chaos and instability.
And the same solution is waiting for us, it always is: recognize that uncertainty is always a part of your life; keep an eye on it while it flows where it’s going to flow, don’t just shove it down and hope it goes away.
There’s no way to safely skip the middle stage of letting go, no way to simply hop over the chasm without climbing down into it. The only thing to do is what’s in front of you. Nothing good has ever come from focusing on step 5 when you’re on step 1. Or focusing on step 12 when you’re on step 4. You don’t need to have your eyes on enlightenment or advanced insight stages when you’re lying in on the ground, counting breaths and releasing the tension in your neck.
Be where you are, and take action appropriate to where you are, rather than trying to escape to somewhere else. That, frustratingly enough, is the only way to get somewhere else.
Extras:
- Carl Jung, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, notes that he didn’t go to to see holy men while he was in India, because
I had to make do with my own truth, not accept from others what I could not attain on my own. I would have felt it as a theft had I attempted to learn from the holy men and to accept their truth for myself. …I must shape my life out of myself — out of what my inner being tells me, or what nature brings to me.
- Campbell: “If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.”
- Emerson: “Do not follow where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and make a trail.”
- Rumi (Coleman Barks): “Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”
- Nietzsche: “You reward a teacher poorly if you remain always a pupil.”
- Kierkegaard: “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
I don’t know how many hundreds of ways there are to say this — I guess as many as it takes until it lands: looking for answers outside of yourself is useless if they don’t lead you to the answers inside you.
Trying to follow someone else’s answers can be dangerous, in about the same way eating wood shavings is dangerous: you’ll feel full while you waste away.