29.

Dissoi Logoi

The man at the table next to me seems to need this music as much as I do tonight. The two other times I’ve been here, I enjoyed the music in a simpler way; I arrived feeling open to the possibilities within it, ready to be moved. But tonight I came here needy, which is probably why the music doesn’t sound as full as it did before and probably why it feels scattered. I’m looking for something that these people can’t give; I am looking to them with a desperation that they cannot answer.

I am surrounded by tension everywhere I turn—even the fiddle player is upset tonight. He is unhappy with the new system that a woman named Margaret (who plays a long, shiny recorder) has introduced for playing the songs. Between songs he either makes sudden, cutting comments directed at no one in particular or he keeps his head down and plays softly to himself until the next song begins. I’m started to think that I bring tension with me, that I drag a long history of missed moments and hurt feelings into and out of each place I visit.

I came here tonight looking to these musicians to lift me out of all of the tension. To Irish waltz me right out of my chair and into a place where people aren’t so angry and hurt and disappointed because of me. It isn’t working.

Thousands of years ago, in the Pythagorean theory of the cosmos, the universe was thought to be made up of opposing forces (the monad and the dyad) that were all the time clashing. For them, kairos was the force that could bring harmony between the two; it was the moment or opening that can create balance. Without the opposing forces, the opportunity for harmony could not exist. There can be no stabilization without destabilization. Opposition, conflict, tension are essential elements in movement and growth.

The trick, I guess, is to see the openings and act on them rather than becoming stalled in the tension. I have been working really hard to let tension roll off of me; I close my eyes and imagine the negativity rolling down my neck and off my arms in quick, steady streams. But maybe I’ve been missing the bigger picture—that Pythagorean vision of the universe where negativity is one essential piece of the cosmic puzzle. I have been waiting for good things to sweep in and fill me up, but maybe the real growth happens in those spaces that are most difficult to inhabit, spaces where tension becomes opportunity, a site and source for change.