I recently read an article from the Rotary magazine about resilience. This sentence from the opening paragraph stuck with me: “Each of us is genetically hardwired to recover after a failure, some more quickly than others…Whatever degree of resilience we possess, we can always work to increase it.” The piece goes on to discuss practical ways to improve on this life skill.
To me, resilience is a learned behavior. When you get knocked down again and again and choose to pick yourself back up, you learn to overcome adversity and failure. It’s not easy, but it can be learned. Pretty soon, it becomes routine and a part of who you are. I’ve talked here about my darkest time, and how I trudged through one step at a time, until the tough years became a memory. I learned that not falling into the deep hole of demise is a choice. These days, if I ever start feeling that way, I always throw myself into the crowd. Somehow, the crowd always lifts me up.
