Stress and Life Energy

What's the role of stress in your creative process? Up to now, stress has been the villain, the unwanted intruder in your life, the obstacle to having and doing and being what you want. What if stress itself is essential to turn a stressed-out life into a peaceful life? To consider this question, we need to consider the connection between energy and life. What's the role of energy in your life? Do you feel energetic or do you feel depleted of energy?

Energy is power in motion. Energy is the difference between life and death. Living things move. Dead things don't. Without energy, there's no power and no motion. Without energy, there's no life.

Albert Einstein said:

Nothing happens until something moves.

Consider how often success language describes moving forward in pursuit of your goals. Progress means to move forward. You're making progress if you keep moving forward. You're not making progress if you have setbacks. A setback is a reversal in your process of moving forward. The language of pursuit of your goals conjures up the idea that you're constantly chasing after goals that are always ahead of you. This is the language of motion in a straight line. Go full speed ahead. Don't look back. Keep moving forward to succeed in life.

The Balance between Opposing and Complementary Forces

The wisdom of Einstein's words that nothing happens until something moves can also generate stress-producing thoughts and actions in your life. These few words omit an important truth about motion in your life. Life energy isn't motion in only one direction. The motion that makes something happen often requires motion both forwards and backwards. Life energy is a balance between opposing and complementary forces. Opposing means opposite. Complementary means to complete. 

Opposing might not sound like a good idea until you stop to consider how handy it is for you to have opposable thumbs. Try taping your thumbs to your hands and spend a day using only your fingers. (You'll have to get help to tape each thumb to a hand.) At the end of the day—if you last that long—you can spend some time pondering the benefits of opposing and complementary forces in your life.

Let's consider another instance. We live on a huge rotating ball traveling in an elliptical orbit around and around and around the Sun. This orbit demonstrates a balance between two forces acting upon Earth. The ever-expanding energy released in the Big Bang pulls Earth outward. Meanwhile, the contracting force of the Sun's gravity pulls Earth toward the Sun. The result of these expanding and contracting forces on Earth keeps Earth in its elliptical orbit around the Sun. If the Sun's gravity were the only force acting on Earth, Earth would be pulled into the Sun, swallowed up, and never seen again. If the Sun's gravity were turned off, Earth would fly off in the opposite direction. In either case, life as we know it on Earth would cease. The balance between the contracting gravity of the Sun and the expanding energy from the Big Bang makes life on this Earth possible.