An Example of Polarity Management: The Grateful Dead's Truckin'

A few decades back my brother Ron, a psychologist, shared a concept with me that seems to have endless applications, the idea of Polarity Management. The concept is illustrated perfectly in two lines from the Grateful Dead's lively hit song "Truckin'." 

If you remember the song, it's essentially about life on the road as a band, with commentary about the various places they stayed or performed from Houston and New Orleans to New York, Buffalo and back to Bourbon Street. It talks openly about life on the road, which for many if not most bands included drugs at the time, so it was a counterculture anthem, not mainstream. 

The stanza that sums up polarity management is this one:

You're sick of hanging around and you'd like to travel
Tired of travel, you want to settle down
I guess they can't revoke your soul for trying
Get out of the door - light out and look all around

Who hasn't had the experience? You get tired of doing nothing and become restless, so you get busy. At a certain point, if you're too busy, you crave a break, a downtime.  So we pause, and it refreshes, but then that pause generates a longing to be active again. It's a cycle

There are dozens, even hundreds, of polarity cycles. Finding the balance between work and play is a problem that leads us into cycles. Some people like structure in their lives and create rigid lifestyles which at times feel like constraints or even shackles that we need to shake off. In our relationships, we may find our natural inclination to be supportive of whatever friends pursue, but then we fall back into a sense in which we feel a need to challenge them a little. ("Are you sure you're marching down the right path? Remember what happened last time.")

In our current post-covid business environment many executive and management level workers are struggling to find a balance between working in the office again (centralization) and continuing the "cocooning" style of working from home and connecting on Zoom. One thing for sure is that the benefits and weaknesses of each style have been experienced so that at least alternatives to what used to be a historical method have now been questioned. What comes next? It waits to be seen.

Roller coasters are exciting, but if we went to an amusement park and spent 98% of the time being flung all about, arms akimbo, we'd be ill. The excitement is fun, even terrifying, when it is temporary. Finding balance between equilibrium and drama is big part of life for many people 

Truckin' was penned by Robert Hunter, the only songwriter in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who was not a performer, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Bob Dylan and Hunter collaborated on Dylan's 2009 album Together Through Life, which I listened to almost continuously as I set up a major art show that summer in what is now called the Lincoln Park District here in Duluth.

To learn more about Polarity Management ask Google. Or see what's available in your local library. Numerous articles and books have been written on the subject. At the heart of them all is an apparent desire find the Golden Mean, a life of balance of sorts betwixt and between all the forces pulling us back and forth in various directions.

For me, there's a lively sophistication in the arrangement in which all the players seem to dance around the melody in this song while no one actually plays it. The singer carries that melody, surrounded by an entourage of sound that is lively, pressing ever forward. It's catchy.

If interested, you can learn more about Truckin' (not necessarily polarity management) here at http://artsites.ucsc.edu/gdead/agdl/truckin.html