The limits of your strength, kindness, and vulnerability are tested over and over in life. Certainly, life events and circumstance contribute and may be out of your control, but resilience is always in your control. Resilience is a unique character trait that is revealed by concrete examples of overcoming a challenge. Resilience is how you ‘keep on keepin’ on’, and it seems to be human nature to observe the limits of the resilience of their peers. It’s as if we understand ourselves and our own resilience by better by calibrating that of the people around us. There is probably a psychologist that has studied this somewhere and one day I’ll look for a reference, for now this is a lesson learned from personal experience.

What I mean by calibrating is, just like happiness, I believe strength and resilience are relative concepts. Happiness is relative, the way people rate their happiness is dependent on how they would rate their communities perceived happiness. Basically, it seems that people test your strengths to measure their own strength. They predict how they would respond to a particular stressor or action and your response is their reference point for their own resilience. If they perceive you as strong, they will continue to push your limits to see the threshold of your strength. If you demonstrate weakness, people use that as a reference point and can perceive themselves as more resilient. I have found that the stronger you look, the more your limits are tested. Weak people tend to get less flack, because they can’t ‘handle’ it. Ever noticed the one person that’s always the butt of your friend’s jokes? That’s the person that can joke with you, laugh along, and they can handle you giving them a hard time. You’ll never see a sensitive person in that position, their character limits are understood and its just not worth it.

The next paragraph is very nerdy, forgive me. To be resilient is a lesson is taught to us from a very young age; Disney movies all feature a main character with at least one dead parent (I believe the only two exceptions are 101 Dalmations and Lady and the Tramp, but I’m too old to keep up). Walt Disney was obsessed with resilience, he was an orphan himself. Perhaps he felt is was part of his own success and he started exposing us to that character trait early. My favorite examples of resilience are Harry Potter of the 7-part Harry Potter Series (duh) and Ender Wiggin of the Ender’s Game series. Both characters appeared strong and they suffered for it as their limits were tested. Harry was ‘the chosen one’ and time after time his limits were tested by his peers (not just Draco, all of them), his professors, and of course- every possible bad thing that could happen- did. The same thing happened to Ender Wiggin, who was brilliant and rose to a leadership position at a very young age. He was bullied and targeted by fellow students and his instructors. They were both called out regularly and often got in trouble as an example was made out of them for the benefit of the group. People expected more from them. But, they had resilience. Resilience helped both of them to overcome much greater challenges that were well beyond their known limits. Resilience is a character trait that can be developed and is in your control.  That “life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it” quote is sickeningly true.

Life is hard. In the end, human nature is to test the limits of the strength and resilience of your peers, but this turns out to be a mutually beneficial practice. We strengthen each other by testing our limits- only the strong survive.

Stay tuned for Resilience Part II: Test Your Own Limits First, up next Monday.

Happy Monday!

 

*This photo of me doing an ab exercise (yes, that’s a side bend) was taken at the half-way point while climbing up the mountains of the Himalayas in North India in 2010. Warm memories, indeed.