Have you ever tried talking to a wall? Actually conducting a dialogue with a wall? Welcome to the horror show of the rigid person.
Let us start from the end. A rigid person is not a person who insists on his own way. A rigid person is a person who is incapable of seeing that other ways exist.
In other words, a rigid person is not a determined person. He is a fixated one.
And mental fixation is a serious affliction.
Rigidity is essentially an intensification of a natural and even likeable human trait: the aspiration to certainty.
If there is one thing the human animal loathes with all its might, even more than physical pain or traffic jams or a date who fails to turn up, it is ambiguity.
Uncertainty drives us mad. People will stay in relationships that are bad for them, and in jobs that feel terrible, purely so as not to be thrown into the abyss of ambiguity.
And it begins, how else, in childhood.
Actually, before that. In infancy.
I probably do not have sufficient powers of expression to describe the terror an infant feels in the face of the chaotic jumble he experiences in the first year of his life. Every hungry rumble in the stomach heralds a distress that nobody knows when will end. Every departure of the mother from the room raises a storm, because there is no way of knowing when she will return.
A one-year-old needs love and security because a small infant is a certainty addict.
And most parents do their job faithfully, creating for their sweet infant an ecosystem full of warmth and clear boundaries that grants him an enormous psychological gift — a world in which it is possible to predict what is about to happen.
When you know what is going to be, it seems we have found the perfect solution to the monster of uncertainty: certainty.
But then we grow up and come out of nappies.
And we are exposed, slowly, to the fact that this world can also be a dangerous place, full of upheavals, and unpredictable.
Now, if the parenting was good and sensitive, we arrived at childhood with something called a secure base.
A secure base does not mean the world is predictable. It means you can survive it not being. The rigid person never got that, and so he has to make the world hold still instead.