Resilience is a word that people like to throw around as if it signifies far less than it does. Often people add an element of whimsy to it by saying things like “We’ll bounce back.” or grabbing a platitude like “We’ll be stronger than before.” What isn’t often discussed is that resilience takes consistent, committed, and very hard work. Resilience is yet another one of life’s many journeys that is infinitely more about the path itself than any hypothetical destination.
That’s part of what makes resilience so difficult. At times, it seems as though people have it or they don’t. At others, it seems as though resilience is so circumstantially dependent that it is impossible to know whether we truly have any discernible way to measure it. We’ve heard it said that life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it, but we also know that life wasn’t meant to be dealt with in absolutes. Often we forget to celebrate the small steps forward, forget to give grace when we relapse as a part of our healing, and assume a much lower resilience threshold than what exists in reality.
It does a disservice to the concept of resilience to allow it to become a buzz word – one filled with visions of optimizing how quickly we recover from setbacks. This isn’t a system needing tweaks to become more efficient or a button that can be pushed to minimize the hurt or hardship caused by a circumstance. Resilience is a practice. A choice in the midst of chaos, disappointment, and heartache. A willingness to forgo bitterness, resentment, and regret again and again and again. A promise to live life in the present and not carry around the weight of the past or live chained by the shadowy unknown of the future.
We talk a lot at Happily in Progress about community and togetherness because we believe in its power and in the goodness that can come from standing with one another in any capacity. Our belief in this power in relationship to resilience is no different. We believe that our ability to choose resilience each day is stronger in community. We believe that to allow authentic conversations about resilience and to highlight evidence of true resilience in our world, we need others around us who are willing to be vulnerable and eager to search for the telltale signs of resilience in progress so we can celebrate the process together.
As we continue our #mindfulinmay journey, we’d invite you today to spend a minute visualizing a small plant pushing its way out of the soil in order to discover the first nourishing, life-giving rays of sunlight. Allow yourself to inhale as you imagine the rays of warmth touching delicate leaves and exhale as the stem stretches to its tiny height for the first time. Continue to breathe and recount the times in your life when you felt the brush of light across a circumstance and were able to stretch and become something more than you thought you were. These moments – however difficult they were to come by and regardless of the scars they left behind – are where we learn resilience.
With every step forward, let’s commit to becoming more resilient. It will be hard. It will be messy. We definitely won’t be perfect at it ever. But that’s not the point anyway.
#happilyinprogress #happybychoice #hardworkpaysoff #unstoppabletogether #bettertogether #strongertogether #beautifultogether #resilience #shinelight #bethegood
Happily in Progress 