Resiliency is the most unique, powerful, and important trait of our species. It is our salvation.

Until recently, I’d forgotten that.

Too often in my life I’ve felt sorry for myself. Sometimes when faced with adversity I ruminate on state and situation, and take a long time to reach acceptance. When I hurt my knee a few weeks ago, I was terrified I tore my ACL. For multiple days I treated it with ibuprofen and ice, and I made an appointment with my doctor when it didn’t get better. Because I was scared, I was slow to accept my injury. All the way up to the appointment I was short-tempered and anxious. But my frustration was for naught: I merely had Runner’s Knee. To worry is to suffer twice.

I feel I’ve lost some resiliency. This wasn’t the case while I was playing sports growing up; the constant slow pain of cross-country requires resolve, and I always battled through injury in football, basketball and baseball. I once played an entire season of indoor soccer with two pulled quadriceps (it wasn’t fun). But I’ve felt more reactive as I’ve gotten older. More reactive to societal vibes, to my aging body, to my perceived place in life. I’ve too easily slipped into self-pity, too regularly decried ‘woe is me.’

Always looking forward - Maui, February 2021

I think part of the journey of life is bouncing back. It’s dealing with the hardships, and moving through them, moving past them. There are many axioms in our culture that illustrate this. There’s the quote by Charles R. Swindoll, “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.” This attitudinal lineage goes all the way back to the Serenity Prayer, with the most well-known version of the line: “God grant me the grace to accept the things I cannot change and to know the difference….” We get to choose to accept our fate and fortune, and choose how to act next. Viktor Frankl taught me that, but back to him later.

My Recent Influences: Lex, Star Trek, and the Love of my life

About a week ago I finished the Lex Fridman Neuralink podcast episode and I was moved hearing Noland Arbaugh speak—he is the first human to have a Neuralink device implanted in his brain. Noland talked so simply about letting things go, about not getting down about his disability in general. I thought to myself, would I be like that? Or would I be “down in the dumps,” (to use his words) for the rest of my life? I feared the answer to that question. His story was not only inspiring, but it made me recognize my fortune. What business do I have pitying myself when I have it so good compared to him? I can walk and swim and run and jump and play sports. I have nothing to complain about, and I should be more resilient. I have a duty, a responsibility to be more resilient. A responsibility to myself, to give myself the best life possible.

Maybe I’ve just been thinking about all this because of Star Trek. I just finished watching the most recent reboot trilogy. It struck me that James Kirk is the epitome of resiliency. No matter the odds or the situation, he pursues whatever course of action secures victory. He does this repeatedly in the films, even in “no win scenarios.” Danger and disappointment don’t bother him, don’t seem to affect him. Spock continually advocates for applied logic, and Kirk regularly rejects the logic if it doesn’t help him achieve his goal. Knowing salvation is unlikely does not impede or even affect his pursuit of it. This is the most admirable character trait in these films—Kirk’s insistence to ‘boldly go.’ We can defy the odds simply because we choose to defy them; if we choose to be resilient.

Most importantly, my partner has inspired my renewed sense of resiliency. She recently had to fill out a questionnaire before a checkup. On the form she repeatedly checked various boxes signifying her exposure to trauma during her upbringing. She’s overcome more than I have ever faced. Ordinarily this trigger a reason for the doctor to evaluate her mental health (Childhood trauma doesn’t define us, but studies have shown it can significantly impact our wellbeing into adulthood). But her resiliency scores were incredibly high—every single question received full marks in terms of resiliency. And I’m continuously amazed by how much initiative and agency she takes in her life, how her upbringing has not defined her. She is the confident, secure and considerate person she is today, I believe, because she has been impervious to that 10%, the “what happens to her.” She lives her life fully within the 90%. She and only she chooses her path forward.

Full Circle after 14 years

My second home, Cape Town, from atop Lion's Head - September 2011

I’ve written previously about my concept of Respect, Responsibility and Resolve. It was something I developed while living outside Cape Town, South Africa back in 2011. Without internet or TV, I read and wrote a lot. I came up with these three ‘R’ tenants—words to live my life by. To have respect for everyone and everything. That was the foundation. To embrace responsibility in my life—I was a young dumb kid discovering his passion for education and teaching, and I was learning what it meant to pursue life earnestly. The last part of the equation was resolve—once I had respect and understood my responsibility, I needed the resolve to pursue my wildest dreams, to pursue the life I wanted, despite any unfavorable circumstances. I was poor and finding my way in life. I realized education was the most important thing in the world, that through education we could solve our problems as a species. We could connect across cultures and continents, as I was doing at the time with my students from all over the world. I resolved to myself, in those few months living in Cape Town as a 22 year old, that I would dedicate my life to education. It was the first time in my life that I understood resolve and fully embraced it.

Fourteen years later, I’ve come back to that last tenant. Resolve is resiliency. They are two near synonyms: resolve refers to unwavering determination toward one’s purpose, while resiliency concerns one’s ability to withstand and adapt to adversity.

And they are both fully within our control. We can choose to be resilient, despite our circumstances. No matter how fortunate or cursed we may feel, we always have the choice to move forward, to move past difficulty, into the future. This is a wonderful, liberating feeling. It reminds me of the optimism and appreciation for life I felt when I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning in 2018. He talks about the ability to ‘choose one’s way in life,’ to choose our experience. This is essentially what resiliency is. It’s the confidence in our own agency, despite our environment or external circumstances. The very act that we have a choice makes resiliency easier. Understanding that while something may be hard, we still have the power to choose to pursue it—this itself makes it more likely to happen, makes it easier for the actual pursuit itself. The ability to have resiliency makes resiliency easier.

Resiliency as a Species

We can also consider the responsibility we have to be self reliant, to hold resolve. We are each one person within a long lineage of humans. Generations upon generations of ancestors came before us and faced hardship. They were resilient and survived, passing on their genes to the next generation, thousands of times, in order to produce us. That means there’s a resiliency in us that has been passed down, that we’ve inherited from them. We just need to act on it.

Homo sapiens have resisted and refused their plight, adapted to the circumstances afforded them by Earth and Mother Nature for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s all resulted in us, right now. We have to respect this as a miracle and to embrace the responsibility of continuing the flame of human consciousness in the universe. The beauty is not just our choice to embrace Resolve, but our opportunity to enjoy its repercussions: the feeling of agency, the sense of confidence and purpose we can derive from our own personal freedom to contribute to the universe. Every human on the planet, every person who has ever lived faces this opportunity, to choose one’s own way. Will we embrace resiliency as individuals and resolve to work collectively as a species? We have inherited the required trait—we control the path to salvation.