Resilience

I used to think resilience was all about your ability to bounce back from defeat, or to rise up after hardship. Alas, this year has taught me a lesson. Resilience is not just about the return to success, the upwards spiral, or the recovery. Resilience is how you handle the downwards spiral, and the troughs. It’s about acknowledging that you can fail and still achieve success. You can lose and still be a winner. You can hurt and still be happy. You can lose faith and still believe. Society too often influences us to soak up the peak moments when we feel amazing, successful, proud, invincible. In reality, no human being can exist on the crest of the wave all of the time. What I now believe to be true is that resilience teaches us how to sit at the bottom, at the lowest of lows, and realise that it’s okay to be there. That it is natural. That it is merely a part of life. And more importantly, that it is temporary, and soon enough the sun will shine again.