Flexible: A Creative Prompt
Imagine a sinuous dragon, twisting in frenzied flexibility, rising to the sun. Could you be like that?
Flexible
You had better be flexible, in these times. How else will you catch all the balls life tosses at you? How else will you do your work, multitask, balance relationships, keep the family functioning? How else will you cope with the uncertainties of these menacing times?
The seven cardinal virtues, rooted deep in Christianity, are faith, hope charity, prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. To these might be added, in more modern idiom, authenticity, cooperation, imagination, compassion, respect and forgiveness. One more concept worth contemplating is flexibility
What is flexible?
Look about you. What things flex, and which retain their form? A line is inflexible. A cord is flexible. Houses, fixed. Trees, moving as the wind tickles their leaves. Water, free flowing, captured in an unyielding glass.
Feel how in your body, movement requires both flexibility and rigidity. Bones are fixed. Your spine is flexible. Your heart flexes and flexes, beat after beat, year after year.
Take some time to watch your hands. See them skim over a keyboard or chop onions, tie flies or tie shoes. Watch them as they knit or play the violin or grasp a book. How do your hand muscles know how to do all these things?
Finally, watch your hands while you are speaking, how they express in the real world what is in your mind or in your heart at a particular moment.
Flexibility throughout your life
How will you move through life? You could, like many of us, drive the humdrum, rigid motorcar of life, its movements closed, dammed, set, unyielding and stifled. Or maybe you see such routines as cloying and unforgiving, keeping you from noticing and developing, going with the flow and growing.
Flexibility is open-minded and responsive, spacious and flowing. It is the fresh air of the spirit, tasting of freedom and openness.
Flexibility is also forgiving. It allows you to breathe deeply. Moving toward it, with it, is more natural and easier that you might suppose.
Imagine a sinuous dragon, twisting in frenzied flexibility, rising to the sun. This dancing dragon is, at the same time, firmly grounded. Like a tree, flexible in its branches but rooted strongly in the earth.
Could you be like that? In your life, in your writing, your drawing, your dreams—even in your most excitable imagination?
Flexibility gives so much and takes little away. Find a place for it as you live, day by day.
Our next word will be. . . Rigid
Click here to read Stretch, the previous creative prompt.
Read more from Fran at Becoming….
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good food for thought, fran. thank you