Tension is often something we avoid. If a conversation seeps into the elevated blood pressure stage, it can be wise to back off. Reconvene when you both remember to release your shoulders. Pressures at work can rob the environment of the satisfaction we sought by taking the job in the first place. The teachers, and nurses, and ministers I know began with lofty aspirations around contribution to society. Yet when a fifty pound sack of expectations is bearing down on you each day, it smashes the life out of such ideals. 

 

The photographer who caught this image describes it as elasticity and water tension. I will bump up against the limits of my own comprehension of such concepts in about two sentences, and have no desire to flaunt my ignorance. But I have played with water in a glass that looks as if it should spill over the edges, and for reasons explained to me as tension, it doesn't. I wonder if the liquid understands. No matter. Most of us comply with rules like gravity and momentum whether or not we passed high school physics. Just spinning on those treacherous round platforms at the playground and hanging on until your knuckles went white was enough of an explanation for centrifugal force. What matter if you cannot spell it, which until now I couldn't.

 

Elasticity, at least to a seamstress, allows fabric to stretch. Gather at the waist, then release over your hips at the end of a long day. She is a first cousin to flexibility, which is one of those properties that has kept toddlers, and their mothers alive for generations. 

 

Tension and elasticity. Sounds like breath. And a heartbeat. And the wind outside my window. Music requires the contraction of vocal cords, and air breezing past. 

 

Plus as this photograph testifies, they are a source of beauty.