Resilience

There are people on Youtube who make bodybuilding videos and later expand into life-coaching themes such as resilience. They recognise the similarities between strength training and character training, just as the ancient Greeks did. This is good, but what worries me is the narcissism I sometimes detect in these videos. It is a subtle thing, but as I watch I get this feeling that resilience is some achievement to boast about, alongside the muscles which are clearly on display while the presenter pretends to be humble. In religion there is an age-old concept for this problem: 
spiritual pride -- a person goes through the motions of being humble, but they are proud of their humility. Such posturing is the opposite of true resilience, because it is about pretending to be something you are not. It is another way of believing you can be invulnerable. We want to believe that we are stronger and safer than we really are. But genuine resilience looks not only to our strengths, it also takes account of our weakness. It changes what it can, and accepts what it cannot. Sometimes when I point out a person’s vulnerability in an effort to help them look at it and accept it, they respond with something like “I guess I am strong through my weakness.” I respond that “No, often we are just weak.” I say this because, in the example I am thinking of, the person is trying at all costs to avoid acknowledging their vulnerability and helplessness. It is true that we can become stronger by acknowledging our weakness, and our vulnerabilities may shift, but ultimately we cannot escape the human condition. This is especially the case with those ones that mark the human condition. What matters is how we live with them. Pretending that we are invulnerable by talking about resilience
 is a form of cowardice – it is a flight from anxiety, a refusal to come to terms with our condition. Just as your body has its limitations, so too does your mind and heart. That’s life.

Many people think of resilience as “bouncing back”. I believe this is the wrong metaphor. We have borrowed that image from physics, where “resilience” refers to “elasticity”: the ability of an object to return to its proper shape after a strain. There is this myth that resilient people are like that, that they return to how they were before significant suffering. But we cannot go back to who we were before. When something changes our life, our life is changed. We are changed. We have to face facts, just as an injured person must take account of their new state. You cannot be the same person you were before your partner died, or everything you loved crashed around you. There is no bouncing back, there is only moving forward. Not “moving on” but moving forward, which means moving through. You get back on your feet. It might take hours or years, depending on the catastrophe. In rarer cases it is a lifelong task. You learn to carry yourself again. And to tend to your wounds, co-operating with nature so that they heal as much as possible. You integrate the new reality into your life. You face your pain with wisdom and compassion. If you can do this, especially the last part, then you will become deeper and stronger as a person, even if you have been weakened in other respects. This is true resilience.
 
Jack Gilbert wrote a poem about his struggle with grief after the death of his wife, which captures this ethos of getting up and walking forward. It is called Michiko Dead.
 
He manages like somebody carrying a box  
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,  
he moves the hands forward, hooking them  
on the corners, pulling the weight against  
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly  
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes  
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood  
drains out of the arm that is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now  
the man can hold underneath again, so that  
he can go on without ever putting the box down.
  
Sometimes “that which does not kill me only makes me stronger.” Sometimes it makes me weaker. Regardless, it makes me different, and I can become better if I respond in the right way. For we can grow through suffering. We can learn humility. Wisdom. Love. I can learn to be much more loving toward myself, compassionate toward others, and I can learn to appreciate life more. To be grateful and kind. In short I can become a better person, and one who is more happy. A person who can carry both sorrow and joy at the same time. That is true resilience.

So resilience is really an umbrella term for a collection of other qualities. Resilience is the exercise of courage, of kindness, of wisdom, and what these amount to will differ according to the situation. This is why I don’t use the word very much but rather speak of cultivating character through virtue, and growing in depth and love. The idea must be balanced with acknowledgement of our vulnerabilities and weaknesses as individuals and human beings. Otherwise the term risks becoming a defensive way of avoiding our fears and asserting our egos. Getting back on your feet, at its best, is an act of love and hope toward life.
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