Resilient Life #5
Exercising your capacity for resilience does not exempt you from problems. Neither does it mean that you must be perfect. As Anna Quindlen says, “What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” Our best self will be resilient, not perfect. Your best self is emerging because of problems, not because of the absence of problems.
In my home, Oklahoma City, stands a tree that inspires hundreds of people every day. This resilient American Elm has been identified in pictures from about 100 years ago. The tree has seen it all. Wide open space, the emergence of a city, good and evil.
On a spring day in 1995, I was working for a publishing company in downtown Oklahoma City. While on the phone with a professor from a university in California, I heard a loud boom. Our building shook, windows blew out, and I immediately explained that something terrible had just happened. As you have probably guessed, the date was April 19th. The event was the Oklahoma City bombing, which took 168 lives.
Eleven years later, we moved back to Oklahoma City. I finally mustered up the courage to visit the Memorial site. And there, standing grandly on the northern bank of the reflective pool, was that old American Elm.
The Survivor Tree.
This famed tree was initially filled with debris from the blast and almost cut down, until a group of people decided to help nurture it back to health. Today, the Survivor Tree thrives and inspires many people to embrace resilience.
Sometimes I visit the tree, just to ponder the inherent capacity for resilience that resides in all of creation. I have witnessed resilience in the people of Oklahoma City. I have discovered this gift in my own family tree. And I have increasingly embraced resilience in my own life.
You hold this same capacity! Not because you are invincible or immune to problems. Rather, you are resilient because you were created that way.
As you live in the upward spiral of resilience, you will face hard realities and still seek understanding. You will dream again and plan again and experience hardship again. But, you won’t give up. You will embrace your inner capacity to exercise resilient behavior. You may even find yourself sharing the hope in your story to help someone else.
You can do it! Today is your day! You can begin living in the upward spiral of the resilient life! The gift is yours. Receive it and live it.
Worth Repeating
What we play is life.
-Louis Armstrong
