Living in the Tension

“I think I’m going to have to leave this job” I said, “It’s not what I thought it was going to be.”

At 22, I was already ‘over’ my new career. A year ago, I had been so excited to start my dream job, but it had quickly turned nightmarish. I was terrible at my job – it was office-based and I had to be quiet and look at a screen all day. The day-to-day lived experience of it was very draining for me, and I didn’t think that was likely to change. It was awkward, hard, and complicated; challenging but not in the fun way. I worked in a humanitarian aid agency head office in Vientiane, Laos, and the organisation did incredible work. It was an amazing opportunity to launch my career in aid work, and I was so grateful to have it, but also it wasn’t as I had expected. 

I thought that I would be interacting with people much more often than I was. I thought that it would be more about doing the best work in the most needy areas with the most needy people. 

Instead, there were real world limits such as budgets, time constraints, geography limitations, monsoons, difficulties in translation, the low-level corruption of needing to pay off government workers who oversaw our work because the government only paid them US$40 a month, petty rivalries between government officials, which meant that one may or may not be able to visit the desired site, or that work may not go ahead where it was really needed.

I was young, naive and idealistic. Also inexperienced, overwhelmed, homesick and lonely. One of my two bosses was a dick. I had my standards. This wasn’t what I thought it was going to be at all! If this job wasn’t up to them, then clearly, I would need to leave. My kete of ways to control the situation had only that option in it. 

“We all have that though, Lauren. We all have this ideal that we’re working towards, and a reality that confounds that. Of course, we want to be working in the most needy places, with the most needy people but the logistical and financial reality is that we need to find the place where our donor’s money is going to make the most impact.

“We have to be pulled by the ideal, continuously, towards something better than what we have now, but also work within the constraints that we have to do the best we can with what we have.

“We have to live in the tension.”

11 years on and I can still hear my very wise boss’s words reverberating in my ears. 

We have to live in the tension between the ideal and the reality.

Reality has never really been my forte. I spend a lot of time envisioning how life might be more awesome, and then set about trying to make it so. I find myself perennially disappointed by the gap between what is and what could be, and how vast it is in most cases. 

It in a lot of ways is a lot easier to prate on about how, in an ideal world, politics would be so much fairer, or I would be so much more self-disciplined, or the justice system would actually deliver justice, or women who say they have been sexually assaulted would be believed, or governments would run without fault, scandal or corruption, or making environmentally awesome choices would be self-evident and profitable to everyone, or racism, sexism, classism, sizism, ablism or any other form of discrimination wouldn’t exist because we would have an educated and enlightened populous that understood the full impact of their words and actions and was considerate of how those would be received by others. 

But how does one actually enact any real change for any single one of those issues? Even if we didn’t have an opposition party or lobbyists stopping us and we had all the resources we needed at our disposal, could we forge ahead with a plan that would actually achieve what we hoped it would achieve? 

History is replete with examples of people trying to create an ideal and actually creating something horrific, with everything from eugenics to communism to neoliberalism.   

So as I set out on this scary path towards my big dream of being a writer, and creating a blog and publishing books one day, I am once again now steeling myself for reality to shit all over my picture perfect vision of how things will go. It probably will. It’s shat over most other things to date. But I’ve learned that reality’s shit is kind of like manure for our roses – it helps us grow, if we use it right.

What do we do in the gap between our reality and our ideal? How do we hold the tension?

It is so much easier to dwell entirely in ideals or entirely in reality. But nothing gets accomplished that way. That tension is hard to maintain. In the same way that lifting weights builds muscle, holding the tension between reality and the ideal builds character, and lifts us towards a new reality. In the same way that lifting weights involves repetition and slow, consistent, incremental effort to show results, this is also how we eek out a pathway towards our ideal, our dreams. 

And, in the same way that you can’t lift weights all day, we also need to take a break, and put down our dreams, to recharge, refocus. 

Do we stop and retreat from our dreams because it doesn’t turn out how we’d imagine it might in our mind? No. Anyone who has achieved a dream will tell you that the path was convoluted, chaotic and there were moments that they thought they were never going to make it.

We need to hold tight to our dreams, our ideals, trusting that even if the path doesn’t look like we thought it would, somewhere along the way our dreams will be realised. We obviously can choose to let some of our dreams go – and perhaps some dreams are best left as dreams – but for those few that niggle and nudge at our hearts, we need to embrace the tension.

No dream becomes reality by merely staying in our minds. We must tell people about it, we must study or research, we must plan and prepare; we must act! Simply downscaling our dreams down to match our current reality is equivalent to quitting. 

If our dreams are that small, then can they really be called dreams at all? 

In the same way that the image of the harp is held in place by tension on the Samuel Beckett Bridge in the beginning of this post, so tension bridges the gap between our reality and our ideal.

The more I started to think about it, the more tension is necessary to many great things in our life – take music for example. There’s not a single string instrument that would be capable of creating music if not for tension. Nor drum. Voices also change the tension of vocal chords when singing. Pianos need tight, carefully tuned strings to make a tune, and guitars and violins are discordant if the tension is even fractionally wrong. Tension is not something to be avoided, but is a necessary prerequisite to all the most beautiful symphonies life has to offer us!

An arrow cannot be fired from a slack bow, boats cannot sail without taut sails, bridges cannot stay aloft, without tension. We are unable breathe, without sufficient tension from the diaphragm. Hell – bras can’t adequately support boobies without adequate tension. We are surrounded by necessary, vital, life-giving tension, and yet it can be so hard to voluntarily enter into that uncomfortable reality-altering space needed to attain our dreams or live in an ideal world.

We speak of it as if it is something out of reach, but look at how many ideals we’ve already achieved as a collective in the last 100 years – progress in equality for women, racial equality, access to healthcare, access to electricity, the internet, and countless other modern marvels.

If you have attained your dreams, and created a bitchin’ reality, then go you! Bask in the glory that is the realisation of your dreams. Relish the dopamine hit. Be grateful for the journey that got you there, and enjoy. 

As you take in this new level of awesomeness, assess – is it what I thought it would be? Do I actually want this, now I have it? Does it make me as happy as I predicted it would? If yes, then win. If not, is it the external dream or the internal churn that is the issue? What did I learn along the way? 

Now, slowly but surely, dare to dream again, and find yourself, once again, living in the tension of what is and what could be. What’s next?

And so here you are at the outset of my dream. Welcome! I’m so excited that you’re along for the ride. This is the beginning of my path towards the biggest dream I’ve dared to dream yet: To put my ideas in print and publish them to the world! The dream that hopes that what I have to say might positively impact humanity, and that this humble collection of characters might help to craft the character of others. 

Dreams are so infallible and shiny when they have only the imagination to flourish in. Let’s see how reality deals with this one.

Come with me, live in the tension, and let us see if we can stretch reality to include this dream, and then so many more after that. Let us make music with the tension!