Today I Choose to be Elastic – How to be Elastic

Elasticity doesn’t mean you don’t get stretched. It means you bend, you strain, you snap back—and sometimes you even come back stronger than before.

I learned that in the most unglamorous way possible: spreadsheets.

One Tuesday at 3 PM, one of our company’s carefully built forecasts was lost. Not just any spreadsheet—the one I’d spent forty hours building. Complex formulas, linked data, color-coded scenarios, everything our quarterly planning depended on. Gone.

The air left my lungs. My chest tightened. My shoulders crept up to my ears. The stress sat heavy, like someone was standing on my sternum.

I wanted to cry. Scream. Throw my laptop. Quit. Eat an entire sleeve of cookies. Maybe all of the above.

The Stretch That Almost Broke Me

It would have been easy to crumble, to wallow in the loss. Forty hours. FORTY. All those formulas I’d carefully crafted. All those scenarios I’d painstakingly built. The presentation was in two days.

I sat at my desk, jaw clenched, considering my options:

• Fake illness and disappear
• Blame technology and delay
• Cobble together something mediocre
• Admit defeat

But elasticity doesn’t give you those options. Not really. Because elastic things don’t just stretch—they return. They bounce back. They resume their shape.

So I did what elastic people do: I took a deep breath, made fresh coffee, and started over.

The Bounce That Surprised Me

Here’s what I didn’t expect: The second version was better.

Without forty hours to overthink, I built something simpler. Cleaner. More user-friendly than the overcomplicated monstrosity I’d lost. I stripped out the unnecessary complexity I’d added just to look smart. Kept only what mattered.

By 11 PM, I had something better than what I’d lost.

The bounce back was hard—my eyes burned, my back ached, my brain felt like mush. But it produced something better than what I’d lost. The stretching had actually improved the shape I returned to.

The Nature of Being Elastic

That’s elasticity: You don’t avoid being stretched; you learn to stretch without breaking.

Since that spreadsheet disaster, I’ve been stretched by:

• Curtis’s diagnosis (stretched to my absolute limit)
• Learning WordPress at 60 (stretched my patience daily)
• Adult children’s crises (stretched my heart in directions I didn’t know it could go)
• Financial setbacks (stretched our creativity and resilience)
• Technology failures (stretched my vocabulary to new levels of profanity)

Each time, the same pattern: Stretch. Strain. Want to break. Don’t break. Bounce back. Often to a better shape.

What Nobody Tells You About Elasticity

Here’s the secret: Elastic things need rest between stretches. A rubber band stretched constantly will eventually snap. But given time to return to form, it maintains its elasticity forever.

After rebuilding that spreadsheet, I took the next day easy. After Curtis’s hospital stay, we had months of gentle recovery. After each stretch, a conscious return to center.

Building Your Elasticity

At 61, I’ve learned that elasticity is a skill you can develop:

1. Accept the stretch
Fighting it makes it worse. Resisting uses energy you need for bouncing back.

2. Remember previous bounces
I keep a mental list of things I’ve bounced back from. Proof that I’m elastic.

3. Look for the improvement opportunity
That second spreadsheet taught me: Sometimes the bounce back creates something better.

4. Rest between stretches
Elasticity requires recovery. Honor it.

5. Stop before the breaking point
Elastic things know their limits. Stretched too far, they snap.

The Spreadsheet Philosophy

Now when life stretches me, I think about that spreadsheet. How losing forty hours of work led to creating something better in eight. How the worst technical disaster became a story of resilience.

Last month, our website crashed. Three years of blog posts looked corrupted. The old me would have panicked. The elastic me made coffee, called support, and said, “I’ve rebuilt worse from less.”

(They recovered it all. But I was ready to rebuild if needed. That’s elasticity—knowing you can bounce back makes the stretching less terrifying.)

Your Elastic Moments

You’re more elastic than you think. Remember when:

• You started over after thinking you were settled
• You learned something new when you thought you were too old
• You survived loss you thought would break you
• You adapted to changes you didn’t choose
• You rebuilt what was destroyed

That’s elasticity. Not avoiding stretch. Not preventing strain. But trusting your ability to return—often stronger, usually wiser, sometimes with a better spreadsheet than the one you lost.

The Truth About Elasticity

Elasticity isn’t about avoiding setbacks; it’s about recovering from them. Life will stretch you—sometimes painfully—but the gift of elasticity is knowing you can return, often stronger, more resilient, and more refined than before.

To be elastic is to trust your own ability to bend, stretch, and still spring forward into what’s next.

That spreadsheet? It’s now the template for everything we build. The disaster became the standard. The stretch became strength.

That’s elastic. Not unbreakable—unbreakably flexible.

Stretch. Strain. Bounce back. Repeat. Better each time.