Stretch, Bounce, Grow
A new paradigm for resilience
Note: Recently, I wrote an essay “Cancer, Sailing, and Living to the Limit” about founding Resilience Racing, a sailing team of cancer survivors. Now, I’m writing about the way I see resilience and how we can each nurture a resilient spirit.
Resilience is a trendy word. It is appearing across sectors, from a way to describe preparation for natural disasters, to corporations planning for the long-term horizon, to individuals dealing with grief and trauma. Corporate education companies are offering “resilience training” for employees, and “resilience” is a buzzword in academic journals on politics and economics.
At its literal root, the word resilience may have originated with the Latin verb resaltare (“to rebound”). We tend to understand resilience as exactly that sort of quality — a bouncing back: springy, alert, elastic, ready.
Like most people who have been through challenges and survived, I have had to learn about resilience. While the core of resilience might be the bounce, the bounce clearly comes after something — and this sequence gives us the idea of a “rebound.” Resilience becomes important not only because it makes us ready for the next challenge, but also because rebounding implies making a comeback.
True resilience starts not with the bounce, but with the thing that threatens to break us. It starts with the stretch.
Stretch
Resilience is a quality that seemingly can only be fostered through the endurance of challenges. The most resilient people learn to stretch through these difficulties. Stretching is painful; it often takes us close to the brink of breaking. These uncontrollable and unpredictable experiences that lead us to the point of near-breaking appear as unexpected turning points: severe illnesses, sudden death of a friend, dissolution of relationships, injuries, accidents, bad news. Afterwards, we find ourselves staring down empty spaces, wondering what is next, feeling the loss of things built and of futures imagined.
Everyone faces unpredictable challenges. These situations force us to the limits of our emotional elasticity, but in the process, we grow more flexible than we imagined was possible. Stretching is an expansion that, at times, can leave us feeling empty and trying to fill the negative space. However, we can also come to realize that this expansion creates room for what we might have crowded out before: ideas, people, emotions, connections. The more we stretch, the more we realize our infinite capacity for stretching, perhaps not all at once, but in increments over time. We start to amaze ourselves with the ability to expand beyond the point where others have told us the limit exists. We expand beyond where we may have imagined a limit.
How do we stretch without breaking? Authenticity. If we know and embrace who we are, we know that we aren’t defined by the struggle, by the pain, or by the hardship. We exist in spite of it, not because of it. True authenticity prevents us from victimizing ourselves and does not allow a pity party, because true authenticity is an act of self-acceptance and celebration. In my experience, it has meant accepting that my interests have been shaped by these battles, but that they can’t upend my soul. The stretch may be uncomfortable, but it creates more space for us to explore, more space for that authentic self to exist. Exploring and nurturing authenticity prepares us to stretch further, to endure more, and to learn from the experience.
Bounce
Rebound is the visible part of resilience; the bounce is what the external world sees when we manage to pick up the pieces and “get back in the game.” It’s the part that leads to inspirational quotes on Pinterest boards and Facebook shares. We talk about getting up just one more time than we fall, or getting “back on the horse.” The bounce is obvious, encouraging, and present.
The very definition of resilience involves a bounce, but rarely do we ask what it takes to go from the excruciating experience of being stretched to the astonishing ability to make the rebound. The essence of the bounce is courage. Courage is not optimism, nor is it foolishness, but it is knowing and understanding the possibilities, and making a willful choice to succeed in spite of what could happen. One has to nurture courage to muster this type of determination. Making a comeback is built on exercising bravery rather than falling to fear when we know unpredicted challenges will arise. Without courage, resilience fails. Without courage, we would stretch, only to sink. Courage fuels the bounce.
Grow
Resilience does not end after the bounce. How is it that those we see as most resilient are able to shout “once more into the breach” and carry on, seemingly stronger than before? Just as a muscle stretched becomes more flexible and stronger, our sense of resilience can be exercised and strengthened. To become more resilient, we must keep going, even after the excitement of the first comeback. To become more resilient, we must grow.
After the bounce, in that period of creativity and rebuilding, of digging into our authentic selves and charting out the next course, what sustains us is a sense of energy: a constant, humming, unwavering perseverance. Energy may be the hardest part of resilience, particularly when the mountains ahead we must climb begin taking shape out of the fog. Sustained resilience is not getting “back on the horse” just after the fall. It is not simply an attitude of optimistic grit looking ahead to the next challenge. It is the intense and unshakable energy of continuing to get up every single day, to push ahead, and to subject oneself to the very situations where one will be stretched, where future courage will be required, and where resilience will again be tested.
