Flexibility: What If You Fail to Cope With Change?

Like the narra tree that blocked the rampage of strong winds and tried to stand still, you may break and fall down if you fail to cope with change. Learn from the flexible bamboo that swayed and went with the rhythm of the wind.

In a world of constant change, people strive to establish a sense of security in a permanent environment and a consistent life style. When the permanent or the consistent is tipped, the boat is rocked and their lives are thrown out of balance. What if you fail to cope with change?

It is when we resist change that we fail to cope with it and this can break us. The tale about the sturdy narra and the flexible bamboo can teach us about coping with change. In a tropical storm, the two trees were lashed by the rampage of strong winds. The narra tree blocked the wind and tried to stand still while the bamboo swayed and went with the rhythm of the wind. The strength of wind overpowered the narra tree and it broke and fell down, but the bamboo remained standing, swaying but unbroken.

Like a narra tree, some people resist change and try to live in the past. As they avoid the pain of letting go of what used to be, they find themselves living in a cruel world, unyielding to their futile desires. Focused on what was denied them, they languish at their fate with broken spirits unable to endure the difficulty of making the most of their present reality.

Flexible people accept change and establish a new balance. Like bamboos, they sway and go with the rhythm of their present reality. They live in the present and they deal with its problems. They accept the new challenges and strive to make things better. Balancing develops flexibility. Wikipedia defined flexibility as a personality trait that determines “the extent to which a person can cope with changes in circumstances and think about problems and tasks in novel, creative ways.” Flexible people see no point in resisting the change that has been served to them.

To cope with change, we first of all need to accept it. Accepting change involves accepting everything that goes with it. Coping with change can be a difficult and painful human experience. It involves bearing the pain of giving up something – a long-held status in a community or well-established patterns of behavior. There will always be moments when we would like to go back to how things were. Accepting change does not rob away beautiful memories and happy experiences but they become things of the past – we can still reminisce them but we can no longer live them.

To effectively cope with change, we need to see the positive angles of our new reality. What if you lost the most important person in your life? Some changes in our life can be overwhelmingly difficult to manage, but if we can find one positive angle in our new reality, we have taken the first crucial step to be able to move on. You still have yourself even when someone you loved so much is gone. In case of major changes, we need to go through a creative transition. We can revisit our past to learn about ourselves, about people, and about life. We can think about the change that happened to us and examine our thoughts and feelings. We need to focus on positive thoughts to be able to replace our negative feelings with positive ones. We can then examine our present situation and explore options for our future. After bearing the pain of giving up, we need to manage the difficulty of living in our new reality. Having accepted the present realities, we can start taking action to advance ourselves into a new territory, new relationships, new goals and aspirations, new responsibilities and commitments, or a new level of being.