Flexibility and Peace

 

While visiting someone today, I sat and watched the branches move to the wind. It has been a a windy day in Dayton, Ohio. A cold front is moving in after a balmy day of 63 degrees. Tomorrow, it will be 16 degrees. The old saying is: “If you don’t like the weather, wait an hour.” In Dayton, we have hints and hopes of spring being killed by frigid temps the next day. I will miss that last couple of days of warmth. But, then again, I will curse the heat and sweat within three months.

I found myself thinking about the branches waving in the wind. There is a great deal of flexibility in those branches preventing those branches from snapping in those 45 mile an hour wind gusts we had. The ability to be flexible helped the trees as well as humans in real life. In order to keep growing in the face of adversity, humans need to be flexible. Mostly, we have learned to be danger avoidant. We order our surroundings in order to survive winter. We go to college to secure degrees to get good paying jobs. Likewise, others learn a trade or a job skill to improve employability.

For me, I am at the beginning of the end of my work history. I retired from paid work, moved through volunteer work to writing grants to continue pushing out education on environmental issues. Sometimes, I am not writing the grants but housing them under my 501c3 to make a better world. We all want a better world from ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. But can we say we are certain our grandchildren will have a better life than ours? Sure, if they work hard, but what if our water can never be good enough because the Environmental Protection Agency is cut so thin?

What if the jobs our grandchildren work are unsafe because the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is closed because of a bill someone pushed through for business? What if there is a measles epidemic and children die from a preventable disease? Oh, wait, that is now happening in Texas. There is a preventable measles outbreak in Texas and is starting in Kentucky because of this “belief” that immunizations are harmful.

Sometimes, individual beliefs or prejudices cause pain and death. It is when our thought processes become so rigid that we lose our flexibility to bend with the wind. And, in that moment, we need someone to stroke our cheek, soothe our frayed nerves, and bring us back to reality, not chaos. The nurse in me wants to do that. I want to bring us back to reality where diplomacy matters. Where there is a free flow of thoughts and ideas instead of the bully silencing reason. I just can’t turn off the news to bring myself peace. I want to help others and myself make peace.

Let’s make peace together. Watch the news. Look for the one thing you can do to make a difference.