Building Resilience is all about the failure.
What if the thing we wanted to build in ourselves, in our children, wasn't success but resilience. What if we weren’t focused on the end, the finale, the gold star. It seems to me that by focusing on the end goal we have missed the most important thing. Success is such a fleeting moment. That split second when we cross the finish line, get the A, complete the task. It’s the tip of the mountain, and then…it’s gone. In life we spend most of time getting to the top. Straining, heaving, building, breaking, moving, stopping, starting. Climbing, falling, studying, trying. Trying. Trying. Failing, getting lost, getting found. Trying trying trying yet again. If we spend 99% of our time getting to the success, why isnt this the part we focus the most on? Instead, we talk about the goal, define it, dream about it, pretend it’s easy and then feel broken or less than we we find ourselves not quite there. Why? If we think about it mathematically, it just doesn’t make sense.
When we become parents, we think so much about all the great parenting moments ahead of us. We think about long dreamy walks in the park. The dance recitals, the soccer games. The camping trips and the school plays. Oh, we think about how amazing all these moments will be. These gold star perfect moments.
And then we have kids and we find out the truth. That the 5 minutes of bliss in the park is preceded by a 73 minute struggle to get of the house and a 90 tantrum after we leave. That the soccer game is 98% carpool and the school play is 85% tears and complaining. The truth is, that humans, life, living, IS about the coming and the going. And how different life might be if we focus on that as the actual experience. What if I thought of the act of learning math as the goal in itself. The training for the marathon is what makes me a runner, the falling and skinning my knee is what learning to walk is. What if we stopped focusing on the summit and learned to love the hike up the mountain. To savor each moment and enjoy the feeling of training, pushing, pulling, trying.
If we shift the perspective to feel like we are thriving in the hard part, rather than waiting for the tiny gold stars, just imagine what day to day life could feel like.
This moment. This breath. This fall. This challenge. This is life.
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