In Heraclitus’s Fragments, he notes that tension is the very thing that makes life sing.

Take a guitar string, for example. If you wind it too tight, it will snap. Too slack, and it will buzz and make no note at all.

So it is with life: it’s not, in Victor Frankl’s words, about finding “a tensionless state,” but about finding the right tension.

(See also: Iain McGilchrist on “the coincidence of opposites.”)