Life comes at you from many angles.
A wise woman once said that a kite flies on a string, not a stick. I’ll be the first to admit that I like having a more rigid structure to my life. Structure makes things simple, understandable, and easy to remember. Unfortunately, with life being the eternal fount of chaos that it is, structure is often at a premium. When life throws you curveballs, and it most definitely will, you can’t just hold your rigid line of thought. It’s like that game show where you have to match the patterns in a wall; if you just stand there stock straight, you’ll get bowled over.
Part of training yourself to be more emotionally flexible is to experience life from many different perspectives. You don’t necessarily have to alter your own perceptions to fit every single other one out there, but just being exposed to them can provide some food for thought. When you’re stuck in a rigid line of thinking, it’s much more difficult to determine adequate solutions to your problems, but if you can change your perspective, you can find solutions that may not have occurred to you prior.
Just as important as experiencing multiple perspectives is realizing that your own perspective is potentially flawed. Nobody has all of the answers; it’s only through learning and exposure that our perspectives widen enough to obtain maybe a few of the answers. You need to understand that just because someone’s line of reasoning differs from yours, that doesn’t necessarily make it incorrect. Unless, of course, you have objective proof that they’re incorrect, in which case, yeah, don’t listen to that hypothetical person.
By becoming more flexible, you can more reliably tackle life’s inevitable problems. We all have our hardships, of course, but they’re much more manageable when you don’t have to walk through a solid wall to deal with them.
