EMBODYING RESILIENCE

When did we decide that resilience was a solo project?

It's not that we consciously chose to define it that way. It's just what we were taught, from the time we were little right up to today: "Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps"; "You're stronger than youw think."; "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.”; “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The cultural consensus is clear: resilience depends on your personal toughness and inner strength. It’s a solo act!

But other voices are on the rise. Take author and activist, Soraya Chemaly, who writes:

“In spectacular arrogance, our mainstream vision of resilience encourages us to ignore, minimize, and even punish the desire for our greatest resilience assets: interdependence, collective versatility, and shared care. Instead of revealing our relationships to one another, our environments, and the systems we live in, this vision highlights and glorifies self-sufficiency, limitless positivity, and individual strength against all odds. It makes us less resilient, not more.”

In a world facing numerous threats of collapse and conflict, Chemaly’s words help us see that correctly defining resilience is not just an intellectual exercise, but a matter of life and death. We all sense it: the road ahead for us human beings is going to get rough. So we simply can’t afford to overlook a single source of resilience.

Which is another way of saying the world needs us to start speaking up too! If those rough roads ahead are to be successfully navigated, we need people who challenge those old-school chants of “You can do it!” with a new mantra of ”We can’t do it on our own!”

That doesn’t mean we have to abandon old messages about personal resilience entirely, but it does mean that we need to get better at noticing when they get in our way. It’s fine to celebrate the classic resilient image of a tree flexibly leaning and bending with the wind, but we can’t let that distract us from the fact that, today, the kind of leaning that matters most is leaning on each other.

It’s all one big reminder that while resilience has a lot to do with what is inside us, it is even more dependent on what is between us. We survive our wounds and weaknesses by having the strength to tell others about it. We find the courage to make our way through the dark only when we sense we are not alone. Internal and individual grit only gets us so far; empathy, assurance and love from others gets us the rest of the way. Boil it all down and you get this: There really is no such thing as a resilient person; there are only resilient relationships from which resilient people arise.

So friends, this month, let’s look around as much as look within. Let’s let up on all the “grin and bear it” talk and instead grab the hand that is reaching our way.