The 22nd verse of the Tao Te Ching is so important and so profound that I’ve been reading and rereading it for weeks, trying to let its message sink into my brain before I attempt to write anything here.  I could probably go another few weeks and still not have the whole of it in my head, but I’m going to go on and write.

The message is simple: If you can be flexible, life will be better for you and for those who interact with you.

Simple message, perhaps, but with profound implications.  You see, flexibility can be applied across so many levels of your character that it’s easy to focus only on one level and miss other equally important levels.  For example, you may be completely flexible when it comes to making decisions about daily activities with your spouse but be utterly inflexible when it comes to your opinions of others.  Lao-Tzu is teaching us that flexibility should be applied across the whole shebang... our entire character.

Once again, I have to bust the happy bubble and say that this is too generic an application for me.  I can’t honestly accept that inflexibility is always bad.  There are some situations for which you must lock your resolve in place and be stubborn.  However, I believe that most of us have crafted a world inside our head that is too rigid and that confines us to a limited existence.  I believe the lesson of flexibility is needed desperately by most of us.  So here we go....

For every part of you that is not capable of bending, twisting, or being reshaped, there is that much of you that has the potential to be broken.  Let me restate this:  Every part of your character that is not flexible is a part of you capable of causing you great pain or trauma.  You have to open your eyes and understand this.  The more flexible you are, the less likely you are of being shattered when something pushes your limits.  I could write for hours here listing examples of how this is so, but just think about it for a minute and I’m sure you’ll see that this is true.  The areas where you are the least able to bend, change, or give ground are the areas where you have to be the most careful in your life.  Otherwise you run into conflict or all sorts of other troubles.

For the sake of time and space, I’m going to assume you get that.  Now let’s move on to look at how to take this truth to heart and actually change our mindset so that we actually become more flexible.

The first thing is to address those two baddies we’ve talked about over and over in these lessons: fear and want.  Most (but not necessarily all) of the inflexibility in your head comes from one or both of these two drives.  Over the course of a lifetime, you’ve built concrete boundaries of beliefs and values designed to protect yourself and to keep you on a course that will lead you toward certain goals.  To some extent, this is absolutely essential to living a decent, productive life.  The problem is that many of us have overdone it.  Our concrete walls are not simple shelters and walkways, but rather convoluted labyrinths and prisons.  We have trouble moving freely because we feel that the path before us is narrow and restricted.  And it might be narrow and restricted, but this is not because of the world around us.  The narrowness and restriction is due to our inability to get free of the rigid structures we’ve built up over time in response to our own fears and wants.  If you could manage to step free of your own inner structures for just a few moments and take a look around, I believe that you’d find the world contains much more possibility than you would have thought before.

Possibility

Potential

Hope

Freedom

Room to grow

Options

By stepping free of your fears and wants and the rigid structures you’ve built around your head and heart over the years, you’ll find that all of these things are yours.

This goes not only for your outlook on the world, but also for your interactions with others.  If you are flexible enough to let go of your need to be respected, you’ll no longer need to prove yourself to others.  If you are flexible enough to not feel like you have to become a certain kind of person, you’ll be able to discover something of who you really are and people will feel more comfortable in your presence.  If you are flexible enough to fail, you’ll be flexible enough to succeed.  I you are flexible enough to let the world around you be what it is (and accept the people around you as who they are) then you’ll find that the world might just have a place for you that doesn’t require heavy maintenance.

Let go.

Let go.

Let go.

Breathe.

Let the walls fall to the ground around you while the world opens up all the way to the horizon in every direction.

Step free.

When you bend, you won’t break.  When you twist, you won’t snap.  In fact, you might just discover what a wonderful gymnast you are and what a vast tumbling mat you have to play upon.