Rigidity

 Rigidity. This word has been heavy on my mind recently..

It causes anxiety; not only for yourself, but for those around you. It causes you to stay stuck in your ways and avoid growth. It causes you to point the finger at others instead of looking inward. 

It’s easy to be rigid, especially when you firmly believe your reasoning behind it. A big one for me was food. I used to be so rigid about eating clean. I became obsessed with reading labels, cutting out food groups, labeling foods as “good” or “bad”. I stayed so stuck in this because I firmly believed that treating my body like a temple was the healthiest thing I could do. But if I’m being honest, all it really did was cause me to be a major pain in the ass. Going out for dinner was anything but simple, friends and family fretted having me over because they didn’t know what to serve. My kids would call me from sleepovers asking permission to eat “junk” foods, and I basically gave myself a heart attack anytime I heard they had access to fast food. I was so sure I was doing the right thing, keeping myself and my kiddos healthy. But what I really did was create a world of anxiety for myself, my kids, my husband and my circle. 

I believe when you are too rigid, you are also controlling. You try to control everything and everyone around you to share your same feelings and beliefs. Spoiler alert: this is no good. My husband is a wonderful man, but he is also a Portuguese man who can have a hot temper. I remember in the early years of our marriage, I’d see him get overly frustrated at a situation or task, and escalate the situation by getting myself upset at the fact that he can’t calm down quickly, or let it go the way I would. The rigidity of my own beliefs in how he should handle a situation didn’t allow a safe space for him to simply be upset. 

It was easy to point the finger. Anyone who didn’t eat clean were the wrong ones (your body is the only place you have to live!). Anyone who offered my kids Burger King didn’t care about their health (do they even KNOW what’s in that food!?). My husband was automatically in the wrong because my patience trumped his reaction (you’re a grown up, control yourself!). But all that finger pointing did was make everything worse. My anxiety had a ripple effect that touched everyone around me. 

The solution to rigidity is flexibility. In an impossibly perfect world, things would just go our way. But that’s not real life, not realistic, and thinking otherwise sets us up for failure. The more flexible we can be, the more at ease our lives can be. But the hard truth is that we only have control of our own flexibility. The good news is, the more flexible we become, the more at ease people feel around us. And sometimes, the things we wished to control, naturally fall into place when you are less rigid because it creates a safe space for people to just be. 

So instead of looking at what I could control based on my own rigid beliefs, I looked at the role I played in my own suffering - and how it affected those around me. I still enjoy eating healthy (if my kids had a dollar for every time I asked them what they had for protein, they would be financially set for life) - but I’m much more flexible. And the result of that flexibility is a more comfortable family; whether it be a dinner party, a sleepover, a road trip meal - I’ve let go of judgement and let my kids be kids. 

And with my husband, I realized that the only reaction I can control is my own. So if he’s working on a house project that isn’t going as planned, I’ve learned to ask how I can help instead of reacting to his reaction. Sometimes that help is giving him space. Sometimes that help is getting dinner ready for when he’s done. Sometimes it’s bringing him a cold beer. But the less I react, the sooner he calms down on his own. My rigid thoughts on how he should think and act only hurt the situation. 

Rigidity keeps us stuck. Flexibility creates peace. It makes space. It allows growth. The examples above are just a couple ways I swapped rigidity for flexibility, and sometimes that can feel like you’re the only one doing the work. But you’ve got to let that go, because doing work to feel better and watch how that positively affects those around you makes the work worth it. 

Don’t stay stuck.