Resilient To a Fault
On Disruption and the Path Forward
Among the maxims that have emerged to me as guides, at or near the top is this:
Very few things are as important as they seem in the moment they are happening.
The technique for applying this in practice, which is also the way to know it is true, is to ask: will this matter in five years? What about five weeks? Five days?
It’s easy to be surprised by what fails the test. Nearly everything will. In this, the primary lesson shines: let it go.
Like all that might be called wisdom, the idea also contains its opposite. In addition to being a tool for perspective, it allows space for situations that are, in fact, as important as they seem.
Learning to see that so many things are not important should help show the things that are. Separating the two, though, can be difficult. We might understand this as a problem of resilience.
Resilience is more than the ability to keep going in the face of adversity. It’s also the ability to snap back, to recover a previous position. This is where it gets tricky.
The snap back serves us well as a matter of survival. Forging any kind of career or personal life (or both) in the modern world would be impossible without some significant measure of resilience. “Get back up, keep going” is good advice when the alternative is “give up.”
But, it’s not necessarily the right approach when there’s another option. It is not, for example, the right approach when a situation is important enough that it calls us to ask: what am I really doing, and does it still make sense?
Uncomfortable though it may be, the past 18 months have been a kind of foundational disruption. With that comes a chance to face what is too easily ignored in everyday life. The opportunity before us, then, is this: to see behind the veil of everything we’ve built.
Because this is scary, we are inclined to avoid it by snapping back to what we’ve known. We want to behave as if the threat has ended without seeing that, not only has it not ended, it isn’t actually a threat.
In The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 noir masterpiece, the detective Sam Spade recounts the story of a man named Flitcraft who, walking by a construction site one day, glimpsed his own mortality when a steel beam fell to the ground and grazed him — a matter-of-inches brush with death.
That same afternoon, with neither notice nor plan, Flitcraft walked away from everything.
“He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works,” Spade says.
And yet…by the time Spade found him, he had rebuilt everything he left behind. New family, new job, all of it.
In Spade’s telling:
“I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of…He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”
The last 18 months are a beam that fell. Many who are fortunate to have survived will, given the chance, snap back.
To which we should ask: is this a case where resilience serves, or is there another way?
