Flexibility in Parkinson's

One of the symptoms of Parkinson’s may be rigidity but that doesn’t mean you have to be inflexible. When you hold yourself tightly in anticipation of the onslaught of Parkinson’s you lose the adaptability and flexibility inherent in human beings.

Part of this mental rigidity is welding yourself to specific plans for the future, based on a prognosis that has yet to contain your specific instance of Parkinson’s. A measure of the extent you rely on such plans is to ask, if your symptoms improved how disappointed would you be to abandon your plans? For example, you predict that you will have mobility problems in the future so you immediately on diagnosis buy a brand new mobility scooter and store it in the garage. The scooter, like the prognosis, will become a beacon and a sirens call that causes you to crash on the shore of self-fulfilling prophecy. If you see your future only as a scooter user then a scooter user you shall become; the more rigid in your planning, the more of the map of possibilities you will miss.

Flexibility in your choices reclaims your inherent adaptability and enables you to react to what is happening now. Predicting an inflexible future is like placing a bet on the outcome of a football match and before the match is played claiming you’ve won the bet.