Five Ways to Hold onto Resilience

I stumble across the finish line, barely able to breathe, and unable to fathom how I managed to make it through the last mile. Doubled over, wondering if I’m going to throw up, I look up and see the course behind me. I see the maze of hills and the freezing rain still pouring like an angry torrent from the sky.

I can still hear the ceaseless voice in my head that followed me every step of the way whispering that no one would care or even notice if I just stopped right there. But there had been another voice whispering louder through the biting winds; a voice that knew that Someone would care and notice. That Someone had prepared each step of that journey behind me with painstaking detail. Every crevice and incline had been there to help me to grow and overcome and connect with wellsprings of strength I didn’t even know I had.

And Someone too had made the light stream through the trees at sunrise and encircle me in a moment of warmth before the rain began. I had held onto that light when I couldn’t catch my breath. I had held onto that moment of warmth when the cold seeped through all the layers I had so carefully put on to keep away the pain. And when I finally catch my breath, there is Someone watching me still as resilience covers me like a blanket made of faith.

I look up at the mountains and whisper, “Thank You.” And as the last light of day falls in soft waves all around me, I wonder how I can hold onto this resilience even as the finish line already begins to fade.

Stay with me just one more day. I whisper into the dying light.

In his book Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life, Navy Seal Eric Greitens shows us how to hold onto this growth and resilience from the finish lines in our journeys. Here are five lessons from Eric’s book on how to integrate these moments of inspiration into our daily lives.

1. Make it a daily practice to accept discomfort and turn towards your goal:

“Start with this: not all pain matters. There are people whose attention is consistently drawn away from their purpose and toward their pain, like a moth to a light. Such people, who pay attention to every annoyance and obstacle in their way, are usually unsuccessful in their endeavors. In extreme cases they are mentally ill. A healthy person, a flourishing person, learns to move past a lot of annoyance and a good deal of pain.”

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2. Accept that fear is part of the process of taking responsibility for your life:

“If you take responsibility for anything in your life, know that you’ll feel fear. That fear will manifest itself in many ways: fear of embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of hurt. Such fears are entirely natural and healthy, and you should recognize them as proof that you’ve chosen work worth doing. Every worthy challenge will inspire some fear.”

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3. Learn to see mistakes as crucial steps towards success:

“Those who are excellent at their work have learned to comfortably coexist with failure. The excellent fail more often than the mediocre. They begin more. They attempt more. They attack more. Mastery lives quietly atop a mountain of mistakes.”

4. We don’t control all the circumstances in our lives, but we can control how we deal with them:

“You are not responsible for everything that happens to you. You are responsible for how you react to everything that happens to you. People who think you are weak will offer you an excuse. People who respect you will offer you a challenge.”

5. Humility is a keystone character trait that enables us to continue to learn and persevere:

“If you start with humility, you see every person as your teacher. Millions of people in all walks of life and in every endeavor, create distractions and excuses for themselves by focusing on tools rather than on character. They’d rather, as Socrates warned, focus on what they have than on what they are.”

With Eric Greiten’s five lessons, we can learn to hear the whisper of this last Jewish holiday, Shemeini Atzeret, when God says to all of us: Stay with Me just one more day, and I will encircle you once again with the resilience of the finish lines behind you and give you strength for the ones stretching before you. And I know, just as I know that Someone cares and Someone notices every choice that I make, that I hold onto that resilience by continuing to make resilient choices.

As Greiten writes, “When real transformation does occur in someone’s life, it usually happens through evolution, not revolution. Every time we make a choice to confront our fear, our character evolves and we become more courageous. Every time we make a choice to move through pain to pursue a purpose larger than ourselves, our character evolves and we become wiser. Every time we make a choice to move through suffering, our character evolves and we become stronger.”

We push through instead of giving up. We confront the pain instead of hiding from it. Stay with Me one more day and I will stay with you. The starting line begins again.