There are things that seem stable simply because the wind hasn’t arrived yet.
An umbrella can be doing exactly what it is supposed to do. Someone opened it because it started raining or because the sun was getting too strong. They carry it along, tilt it a little when needed. Nothing particularly remarkable.
Until a gust of wind comes along.
Suddenly, the umbrella starts moving in a way nobody asked it to. The fabric shakes, the handle changes direction, and you find yourself in that little battle we’ve all had at some point: holding on tighter, trying to straighten it, turning it this way and that, somehow persuading it to behave like it did five seconds ago.
Sometimes it works.
And sometimes it ends up completely inside out.
There is something almost ridiculous about that moment. A few seconds ago, the umbrella was doing its job perfectly, and now it looks like it needs someone to rescue it from itself.
But maybe it isn’t broken.
Maybe the wind simply changed the conditions.
And that made me think about how easily we call something stable when circumstances happen to be favorable.
A person can go a long time appearing to have everything under control. Not because they are pretending, and not necessarily because we were wrong about them. It may simply be that not every circumstance has made its way to their door yet.
There are winds we haven’t met yet.
And the same is true for us.
We can think we know how we would react to certain things simply because we have never had to react to them. It’s easy to imagine ourselves patient when nothing is testing our patience. It’s easy to feel steady when nothing is trying to move us.
Then something we never saw coming arrives, and we discover that perhaps we weren’t quite who we thought we were.
Sometimes we bend.
Sometimes we surprise ourselves.
Sometimes we have to pick up the pieces of a version of ourselves that worked perfectly well until it didn’t.
And maybe bending isn’t always a bad thing.
An umbrella that turns inside out can be opened again.
It may not look exactly the same. You might have to close it, straighten things out, make sure the ribs are still where they belong. But it can still do what it was made to do.
I suppose people can be like that too.
There are moments when changing position doesn’t mean we’ve lost. Sometimes it simply means we’ve stopped facing the wind in the only way we knew how.
Because we can be pretty stubborn too.
There is something in us that wants to keep holding on to the umbrella even when the wind is making it perfectly clear that this is not the moment.
We grip it tighter.
We lean into it.
We keep walking.
As if enduring a few more minutes would prove something.
And maybe there isn’t always anything to prove.
Sometimes closing the umbrella is the sensible thing to do.
Wait for the gust to pass.
Open it again when the weather allows.
Not because we lost, but because there are moments when insisting isn’t strength.
It’s simply insisting.
Perhaps that is why wind can be so revealing.
It doesn’t necessarily destroy whatever it finds. Sometimes it simply shows us how prepared we were for something we never saw coming.
And it reminds us that stability doesn’t always mean staying exactly where we are.
There are things that seem stable simply because the wind hasn’t arrived yet.
Written by Kesef Project