On resilience.

Resilience. We should be consistent and we should build resilience. Parenting 101.

I shared some thoughts and questions about consistency the other day and now resilience has come up to be unravelled and reckoned with.

I don’t question it in the same way. Where I wonder about the way we value and focus on consistency as a necessity I know for sure that resilience is one.

We absolutely need to build resilience and we need to pass resilience on to our children. The part I wonder about and question is the definition and view of resilience we as a society seem to have come to. The way we talk about it and teach about it, but continue to see a struggle with it and need for more of it all around us.

We seem to have aligned and overlapped resilience with toughness, with not being moved or affected by what life throws at us. Tough means hard, tough means rigid, tough means immovable and I wonder about how it seems to me that being resilient actually requires the opposite.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back, not immediately necessarily, but it means that we CAN be moved by life, knocked over even and then able to get up and continue moving with life.

Focussing on being tough and immovable only strengthens the hard parts within us. It gives the hard parts within us power and control to protect us by disconnecting us from ourselves and life. To protect the soft and vulnerable parts of us by sending them deep, to curl up in the darkness inside, guarded.

Real resilience comes from knowing our soft and vulnerable parts. From being with them and feeling what they bring up in us when life inevitably bumps into them and makes a mark. So that, like a crease in a piece of foam, the marks might settle out in time after being acknowledged, loved and accepted.

I wonder if we could do a better job of building resilience in our kids by letting them see more and know more of our soft parts, our unsure parts, the parts that are easily hurt when they are hit by life.

By allowing them to see us being moved, affected, shaken and altered by life. By showing them that it’s in the moments when we take our armour off and stand our ground as life comes hurtling towards us that we are made. That we are strengthened and become bigger than the things that hurt us, as well as the things that try to trick us into believing that heavy, hard armour is what is needed to protect us and keep us going.