Sometimes I don’t think I have the energy to do one more thing, and then I do it. I say to myself, “Okay, that’s enough. You really don’t have the bandwidth to write one more email, talk to one more person, stomp out one more small brushfire before it becomes an inferno.” And then I find myself hunched in front of my computer doing that one more thing. A few years ago when I had to pack up all my stuff to move across the country, there were times I felt like I couldn’t do one more thing, pack one more box, load up one more garbage bag full of “gently used” clothes to donate to charity. And yet each day I managed to keep going. Sometimes you have to continue to put one foot in front of the other and keep going, there’s simply no other choice.
Tonight I am once again grateful for the twin gifts of resilience and perseverance. These are remarkably renewable resources: no matter how I might worry that I’ll run out of the strength, means, ability, resourcefulness I need to accomplish a given objective or overcome a particularly tough challenge, when I dig down they continue to be there, sustaining me. I want to be clear, however, that I do believe that sometimes it’s alright to temporarily go on strike, to sit down in the middle of the task, to momentarily cry “uncle,” when you feel like you’ve taken about as much as you can bear. Here’s the amazing thing, and this is the power of resilience, you bounce back, kind of without doing anything.
resilience |riˈzilyəns|noun
1 the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity: nylon is excellent in wearability and resilience.
2 the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness
I believe every human has some degree of resilience, probably some more than others. Or maybe it’s simply the circumstances in our lives that help determine just how much resilience you have, how able one is to bounce back from difficulty. I was recounting to a colleague today about the “series of unfortunate events” that engulfed me a couple of years ago in which I lost a parent, my partner, my job, and my home in a six month period. It was a trial by fire that truly tested the limits of my ability to handle everything that was happening to me, let alone to begin to recover from it. As is the case whenever one faces challenges, the road to recovery can be a painstakingly slow, laborious struggle first to crawl out from the abyss into which you have fallen, to get to your knees and finally to your feet and begin the first stumbling steps forward toward regaining your balance. It took me quite a while before I felt like I had my legs up under me and could move forward with some measure of confidence.
So yes, every once in a while, I say to myself, “Not one more thing.” But then I think back on much more challenging days and remind myself that I recovered from those things and that this current challenge I’m facing is a piece of cake by comparison. I don’t do that to diminish the current challenge–it’s definitely not fun to feel exhausted and overwhelmed by various things going on–but it perspective helps me put the current challenges into perspective and recognize that I can in fact handle it.
I’m grateful for the gift of resilience and the seemingly inexhaustible supply of whatever “stuff” it is that keeps me moving when I would have long since quit. It is one of the many gifts of grace that are there whenever I call upon them, even if I didn’t know they were there or that I would need them. And for that I am most exceedingly grateful.
