Resiliency

Nobody celebrates a stone that keeps rolling downhill

Riding momentum is not difficult. What’s truly remarkable is a stone being rolled back up that hill.

Nothing worth achieving comes without struggle and failure. The ability to work hard, fall and then keep going is rare. Resilience is quickly becoming the generally accepted #1 factor for success. Those who can gather themselves after a loss and continue moving forward to goal reach it. Those who fall down and commiserate with the others on the floor around them… just stay on the floor with broken dreams.

The thing about resilience is that it really only developed through adversity. People need to experience difficult situations to prove to themselves that they are able to come through it successful on the other side. But it seems that we try everything we can to avoid calamity rather than face it. It’s not logical to assume that any one individual will go through their lives without encountering serious resistance, so instead of trying to continually protect against it, what would happen if we prepared people to become resilient, so that when they encounter hardship it doesn’t defeat them. You can’t stop the bad, but you can prepare a person to overcome the bad.

Consider:

· Kids have been over protected and coddled for years… but then we wonder why they have a hard time moving out of home.

· We are provided with all kinds of modifications at our jobs so each employees can have a work space environment ideally suited to our individual preferences… but then we wonder why employees have little motivation to solve difficult challenges in their jobs.

· We get into dating relationships and it feels good at first. But when things become difficult, we break up. It’s no wonder why so many marriages end up in divorces because of “irreconcilable differences”, our dating lives have trained us this way.

We’ve trained ourselves as a society that when we face problems, don’t work on yourself - just try to change the problem. Manipulate the situation so that it’s easier.

The human spirit and will has powered people to swim the great lakes, rebuild financial stability from bankruptcy, fight slavery, carry limp bodies out of burning buildings. People have proven time and again that even when the odds were stacked against them, the ability to push on granted success. None of these things happen when a person decides that the situation is greater than our ability to regroup and attack again.

I read Proverbs 24:16 and was reminded that a righteous person may stumble and fall 7 times, but gets back up. That’s not easy… but it sure is a plan for success.

So let’s all stop rubberizing our kids play areas and wearing pshysio tape to play rec basketball.

Let’s teach ourselves that we can fall.

Fail.

Hurt.

And yet still succeed.