What is Resilience? And Why Now is the Time to Practise It

June 10, 2020

Several years ago when Meg Warner began writing the drafts for Joseph: A Story of Resilience Brexit was only a 'pipe dream'. Later, in the editing stages Brexit had become the greatest challenge to have struck the UK for many decades. In March 2020, the book entered the final stages of publishing and the coronavirus pandemic had threatened to overshadow Brexit dramatically. Meg writes that although she does not know what context we will be in when we pick up this book, '...the pressure on every single one of us – individuals and communities alike – to be resilient and to practise resilience will have grown exponentially'. You will now find in this blog post two extracts from the book, one on what resilience is, and one on your resilience journey.

What is resilience?

‘Resilience’ has become a buzzword in recent years. If you start looking out for it, you soon find yourself seeing it everywhere. Everybody wants to discover how to build their resilience and how to be more resilient than the next person. Indeed, resilience has become a bit faddish. And like every fad, it has its dark side as well as its benefits. One of the ‘fads’ that preceded resilience, you might remember, was ‘mindfulness’. Both resilience and mindfulness are enormously valuable in and of themselves, and even though both may sound very ‘twenty-first century’, they both have origins in Christian tradition and in the traditions of other ancient religions. But in the wrong hands, each can be used as an abusive weapon instead of a supportive tool. Let me give you an example: as mindfulness training started to proliferate in the corporate world, people began to suspect that corporate bosses had more than the simple well-being of their employees in mind. Did they really just want to improve the lives of their often stressed or exhausted employees, or was their primary concern to equip those same employees to work even longer hours, being even more productive? In a similar way, a danger of the increased interest in resilience is that resilience becomes just another ‘skill’ that is measured and weighed and demanded of people, so that those who do not cope can be criticized for lacking it, while ideals of resilience can be used by the powerful as reasons for withholding fair treatment or justice from the more vulnerable.

Your resilience journey

I wonder where you are coming from in your journey to resilience. You may be living in the aftermath of a terrible event involving tragedy, bereavement, injury, injustice or betrayal. If so, the fact that you have picked up this book may (but see below) mean that you are ready, or on your way to being ready, to take deliberate steps in your thinking and in your actions, to move toward healing and either to return to your life or to begin the hard work of building a new life. You might be ready to start (consciously – the process may already have begun) to sew seams of gold into your broken self.

Alternatively, you may be in the middle of a long or protracted ordeal that demands from you patience and fortitude just to keep going. For some of you, that description could be applied to your work situation. You may require resilience just to keep on getting out of bed and going to work every day, because your work environment is tense or abusive, or because it is, by its very nature, dangerous. On the other hand, your work may simply be boring and repetitive or may not make good use of your skills. Perhaps, like me, you are having trouble finding appropriate work to do and perhaps the financial consequences of that are a cause of stress. You might be living with chronic illness, or caring for somebody who is ill, or visiting someone who is in prison (or serving a prison term yourself). Living with long-term illness requires huge amounts of fortitude, especially if you hope to keep your closest relationships intact! Perhaps your ordeal is loneliness, or some other form of longing or grief, that saps your energy and seems to drain your life of all colour.

On the other hand, you might come to the topic of resilience from another vantage point altogether. If one of the two previous categories applies to you – if you have experienced an acute event, or you are living with chronic stressors – your need for resilience skills and aptitudes will be pressing. But if you are fortunate enough to be simply getting on with life as normal, you may still feel that your life could be greatly improved if you had the skills to navigate and respond to ordinary stresses and strains and to ‘bounce back’ quickly and cheerfully. Wherever you currently fit on this spectrum of experience, you stand to benefit by thinking about how you can build your resilience and by putting the theory into practice. Ironically, you may find that doing resilience work comes more easily if you fit into one of the first two categories – if you are recovering from a major event, or living through a protracted period of challenges. That is because you will have more to gain in the moment and because experience of disasters and hardships tend of their nature to promote resilience. That old aphorism ‘whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ is pretty much on the money. But don’t let that put you off if you’re currently getting along pretty well; we can all do with learning about, and practising, resilience in our fast-paced, demanding world.

Lacing her commentary with telling anecdotes from her own life story, Meg Warner shows how a deeper understanding of Joseph’s story can help you develop the vital quality of resilience: the will and the strength to endure life’s hardships and rise above the effects of trauma whenever it may strike.

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