When the tension prevents to live
In July 1971, in Moscow, I attended one of the Petrosyan-Korchnoi chess-games in the framework of candidates for the tournament. (Eventually, the Armenian grandmaster won the match by 5,5: 4,5). It stroke one’s eyes how the opponents were behaving so differently. Leningrad-based GM was not cut off his glance from the chessboard for almost five hours, he was sitting very tight and tense. Petrosyan, on the contrary, was sitting in the chair half-laid, with his hands in his pockets, looking out the window, on the ceiling and at us, the audience. Often, he was going out to the backstage. Korchnoi was self-established, he wanted to prove something with his match while Petrosyan was just playing without excessive psychological tension. In my (of course, purely amateur) impression, Tal, Petrosyan, Spassky and Fischer were approaching the chess as a game, whereas Korchnoi, Karpov, Kasparov and many modern chess-players were having a “life-and-death battle” at the chess board.
The matter here is not about the size of the talent and even industriousness but the life perception. To live by constantly creating psychological tension inside you and around you, or to live by enjoying every moment of the life? In the rest of equal conditions, to live without tension is more effective. Has it happened to you that you eagerly want to remember, let’s say, the name of this-or-that person? You strain your brain, you say, “Oh, it is on the tip of my tongue,” and he are unable to remember. But later, when the tension is gone, this name “unexpectedly” appears in your field of vision. Everything is very simple, the contracted brain is working less efficiently than the free brain.
Starting from the kindergarten and especially the school years, we teach the children that the more you work hard, the more you will succeed in this life. And we put scores to the children as an index of working “more” or “less”. As the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus used to say, the school prepares us for life in the world that does not exist. No teacher says at school, you will achieve success in life, if you will be able to love, first of all, the work that it assumed to you. And in that case, no psychological tension arises because of work and there is no need for any “technique” of “meditation” to ease the tension. I, for example, cannot say about myself that I work less (the people who know me would probably approve it), but I am not in tension at all, because both writing and speaking on the air is a pleasure for me. Psychological strain would arise in me if I had complained every minute, “Oh, why didn’t I become an MP or an oligarch?”
But the matter here is not just the work. The human brain is clutched and the nerves are tense when he feels some pain and “eagerly” wants the pain to go away. These efforts lead to the fact that all you attention is focused on the pain and the emotions associated with it, and, as a result, it is not even clear what you are mostly concerned about: the pain or the emotions incurred. Isn’t it more effective to be “friends” with this pain and, if possible, to “release” it. Certainly, the problem is primarily the psychological pain (incidentally, I think that 95 percent our pain is psychological), when we, for instance, are “upset” from something or with someone and are strained by elaborating plans for revenge. The Armenian word for “being upset” accurately describes the emotional state when the brain is put in a narrow and limited circle.
Do you remember the American “A Beautiful Mind” film, where the main character suffers from schizophrenia? When he learned of his illness, he is trying to overcome it with the help of physicians, to suppress his mental problems also with “anti-depressant” drugs. But then, he realizes that suppressing is useless, and he has to live in harmony with his mirage, realizing, however, that they are mirages. This is how he is able to “release” his pain.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN,
“Aravot” daily
