When I was growing up my mom hung a cute little placard on the fridge that said "Blessed are the FLEXIBLE, for they shall never BREAK," with the word break spelled out in a shattered-looking typeface.
I couldn't help noticing that even when my mother left my father some years later, the sign stayed up on the fridge for quite a long time afterward; she took very few belongings with her when she moved. Periodically my sisters and I would ask if she wanted us to bring her some of these things -- heirlooms, keepsakes, things that were undeniably hers. Her yearbooks. Her china.
"No," she'd say quietly, "That was part of my old life." And that would be the end of the conversation.
In reference to the end of her own marriage, my aunt Judy wrote: "The break, when it came, was so swift and clean that sometimes I dream I went walking in the coulee behind the ranch house and emerged on the far side of the mountains."
I find that obscurity, as mentioned in the fable pictured above, is hardly the quality that set the reed apart from the mighty tree, nor is it a quality that saves anyone from anything -- though it does keep people from receiving the help they may need in a crisis. The two plants seem equally smug about their respective abilities to withstand the storm, but in the end neither has any more control over their structural integrity than you or I do.
Far less, in fact. As humans we're able to overcome more physical limitations in our own lifetime than any other organism in the history of the world. We have the advantage of pulling up our own roots when we see the storm coming -- if we see it coming.
The Tower card is an emblem of these emergency adaptation procedures. Whether or not you manage to avoid the lightning strike is irrelevant: you will not always be as you are now. If you cultivate flexibility as you go, the inevitable upheavals will be less likely to shake you to the core.
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