“What doesn’t bend, breaks”

Stuck. Pedalling with no forward progress. Swimming against the tide. Running but not going anywhere.

I heard this quote today, on a Netflix show while I sat on my turbo. And it lodged in my brain like a record stuck on repeat. A bit like my legs spinning around on that indoor bike feeling the effort of exertion, putting in the work and yet, going nowhere.

That’s a little how my life has felt like recently. Stuck. Pedalling with no forward progress. Swimming against the tide. Running but not going anywhere.

And then I remembered this poem from Tyler Knott Gregson.

I picked up his book ‘Chasers of the Light’ in a small bookstore in Bahrain in 2017. I was in the trenches of a very traumatic break up and, it sounds kind of cliché now as I really wasn’t someone particularly interested in poetry at the time, but I somehow walked out of a bookstore with two random poetry books. As you do. This poem became a mantra of sorts. Let this storm bend you, but you won’t break. You are better than the breaking. You are made of more strength than you know.

This resilience; this bending with the forces, taking the blows, fighting your way back up, pushing back against the tides. This constant bending and looping round and curving back up has left me in a bit of a knot. A ‘gnarly, bundle of roots at the base of a tree’ kind of knot that inevitably trips you up.

In the space of 10 minutes, I had decided my brain was in a knot while my body was putting in all this effort and my legs were peddling constantly below me and I have been moving nowhere. Excellent. Had I now managed to turn an hour of movement and release into spiralling into a mental knot instead?

Yes and No. Because sometimes these little moments of realisations and acknowledgments can shine a light on the truth and what it is you need to work on. And at some point, all the energy you’ve been putting in has to break through the resistance and catapult you forward right? Or maybe the only way out of the knot is to course redirect. ‘Plot twist’ it. Birth some new idea into reality instead.

Bending doesn’t have to mean resilience or independence or standing up for yourself. Sometimes bending is asking for help when you need it, allowing others in to support you and also adapting to a new route, outlook or view. So I ask you, what do you need to bend on?

What doesn't bend, breaks. Bend.