TENSION - VISIONS & FEARS

Some of you wrote to me the other day that you think we should avoid tension and anxiety - one of you even wrote worrying that I'd lost it and should take a break from Power Station as the suggestion was clearly evidence I was frazzled.

But I disagree. Tension - and I think sometimes anxiety, is just life calling us on, and challenging us to grow..

I do believe that only by taking our fears on directly can we really grow to our full heights, and life calls all living things on to grow. In the message I challenged you to ask yourself if you believe we can make a difference, right here, together..

Some of you wrote to me that YES we can. And others were more fatalistic and sad and felt we'd missed the boat. And all was lost. That's very sad and I hope if you're following this story that it will eventually give you some courage and hope! 

Anyway I rang Victor Frankl - the famous psychologist and he suggested I tell you this:

“It can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.

Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency.

I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology "homeostasis", i.e., a tensionless state.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”

― Viktor Emil Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

(I didn't really ring him as he's long since dead - but I do think of reading / writing as a form of mentorship and try to spend around an hour a day doing them)

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