Flexibility and Fluidity

Flexibility and Fluidity

My first earthquake in Chile taught me about the importance of flexibility. We were living in our old wooden house on an island in the south and woke up in the early hours of the morning to the house swaying back and forth alarmingly. It took us a few seconds to realise what was happening and we ran out the house with our visiting friends, kids, cats and dogs, and sat on the front step while the house moved behind us, the flag pole in the garden flexed like rubber and waves broke on the shore of the usually waveless inland sea channel. We soon learnt that, while terrifying, it is precisely this ability to flex and stretch under the horizontal forces of an earthquake that makes buildings safe.   

But later, when our daughter moved into a flat for university, we fretted about the rigidity of concrete high rises. But located in the Pacific Ring of Fire, Chile knows a thing or two about flexibility – just add ridiculous amounts of steel to the skeleton of the building. Which sounds like an oxymoron but reinforcement steel, or rebar, has elastic properties which help buildings return to their original shape and position. It is flipping scary being on the 24th floor of a building when an earthquake hits and you are running down the fire escape with your phone torch for light. But you have to hang onto the fact that it is that sway that is keeping you safe. 

The point of this architectural crash course is about how learning flexibility protects us in our lives. Whether we like it or not, life is constantly moving and changing and in order to navigate these changes we need to develop flexibility and fluidity rather than the ´security´ we mistakenly think we find in perfectionism and overplanning. Life is a constant balancing act of adapting and readapting, and if you approached it as though you were hopping across the rocks on the seashore, you would fall far less if you learned to move fluidly rather than rigidly. And in so doing, you would do a lot more living.

Vanessa