Resilience is what lets us continue.

Over the weekend, I read Jami Attenberg’s article in the New York Times, “Is Resilience Overrated?” that reflected on the exhaustion people can feel when asked to be resilient. Resilience is not cooking a three-course meal every day or learning a new skill while in quarantine. It is defined as the ability to recover quickly from challenges. 

Resilience is not a nice to have. It is right there in your gut, next to the fire burning hotter and hotter that drives you to say something, to do something. Resilience is what lets this fire keep burning and is what unlocks the power within you. There is no fire without oxygen. It is not an indulgence to care for yourself. It does not compromise your work, or your purpose, it fuels in. Personally, I have tried it the other way. I ignored my needs and was the life raft holding others above the water. It didn’t work. In my case, I almost died and my flame of purpose nearly went out. My purpose is to help others learn this lesson sooner than I did. We are all resilient - the question is not if we are or aren’t resilient it is rather, how might we engage in those routines that bring our resilience to the surface? This is the time to activate it.

Never waste a crisis. It’s a marathon not a sprint. I hear these metaphors but I also increasingly hear the rebuttal - that the compounding crises we are living through are too urgent for us to slow down and care for ourselves. Human rights are being violated, democracy is under siege, the death toll is rising, a capital city has been reduced to rubble, our climate has changed and unleashed another season of fires. These conditions are apocalyptic. 

How do we resist the gravitational pull to put our hands over our ears, close our eyes, and curl our bodies into a ball to tune out this chaos? To give into the thought that nothing we do will make a difference. How do we look past the limits we have passively accepted or which have become invisible with time? 

Martin Luther King, Jr, called his fellow clergymen, and all of us, to awaken from complacency with the words, “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here... injustice anywhere is threat to justice everywhere.” 

What shouts are you hearing? What are you doing to turn us away from the Dark Ages and towards the Renaissance? What we do now will determine what happens after this apocalypse.

In speaking with change makers and leaders from around the world I hear exhaustion. I see them inflicting anger towards themselves for not caring more about their own needs - for not metaphorically putting on their oxygen mask first. Our work can certainly sustain us, in part, when it provides meaning and purpose. We also have needs for restful sleep, healthy fuel, movement, connection, and moments of calm and clarity. How do we sustain ourselves so that we can rise to this most urgent of occasions and create light instead of darkness? 

As we listen to the call to live a purposeful life, to show compassion towards others, we must also turn this compassion towards ourselves. We must nourish our resilience. 

I have the pleasure of meeting with other Aspen Institute fellows from around the world this week. Yesterday, we read and reflected on Maya Angelou’s poem, Continue, and talked about what lets us continue in our efforts to stretch our leadership and address the urgent problems at hand. In this stanza, Angelou reminds us of the dialectic of being present in suffering while also expanding our capacity for joy:  

“Continue

In a society dark with cruelty 

To let the people hear the grandeur 

Of God in the peals of your laughter”

Resilience is what lets us continue.