Fall in love with tension

In Buckminster Fuller’s tensegrity model, there is this beautiful relationship between tension and compression. Bucky demonstrated that tensegrity exists in all of nature.

So often we avoid either tension (blow apart stress/pull/exterior) or compression (contraction stress/push/interior), but for integrity to occur (for things to hold their shape), we need both.

Fall in love with tension. Balance it out with some solid compressive forces…the things that push people and projects and strategy together. Deadlines, expectations, teamwork, routine, rituals.

Fall in love with compression…with structure and systems and doing the grunt work. Balance it out with tension, with disagreement, some measure of chaos, creativity, passion, polarity.

This applies to all relationships. When we collapse the polarity, when too much egalitarianism is built into the design, when we do not get to express our polarities, we get implosion. When too much polarity is expressed, we get an explosion. A healthy relationship has consciousness of polarity designed into the relationship.

PS. The tensegrity model will not hold its shape (be in integrity) until the very last tensile element is added.

January 18th 2019

Photo Taken January 18th, 2019