Jargogled Impressions.

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” Confucius

Resilience is under-rated as a skill. It is said that how you behave when down speaks more about your personality than when things are going well. Recovering from a setback, or a series of setbacks is not easy, no matter how wise you are or how many books you have read on this. When you get to experience the day in and day out of this situation, the minor infractions can seem like daggers aimed directly at your heart, meant to decapitate you. Your mind plays tricks on you and it is when the limbic system gets over-activated leading to a flight or fight reaction. Flight is not really a thing in the modern world and our minds have not adjusted to this new reality from the thousands of years of hunter gatherer evolution we have gone through. As such, we are only able to respond through fight, which, unless you are in a fight club or something, translates to arguments with those you find yourself interacting with. This is bound to go bad, because when we are fighting, when we are angry, we tend to lose our capacity to operate our prefrontal cortex brain which is responsible for logical thinking. As such, the situation can turn from bad to worse in a moment. And thus begins the downward spiral that takes many a good soul in its wake. 

All of this is very well depicted in movies and in books. Art has a way of capturing the human condition really well but we tend to only understand those movies or books when we go through them ourselves. Then, those captured moments of observation that good directors have an uncanny way of capturing really shines through. 

“Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” JK Rowling

In the busyness that is the life of an immigrant parent, I left off reading fiction somewhere in the dirt, moving on to non-fiction first, and then to nothing. My reading habits plateaued dramatically and the drama of everyday life took its place in the consciousness of my mind. It’s sad though, as I think fiction has a healing effect not just because it’s an escape mechanism. It’s also because the stories capture the minutiae of daily life and the struggles and realities of life outside of ours in a deep, empathic, and colorful way that no other source can provide. 

We humans love community not just because it’s convenient. It’s also because we want to share our lives with others, understand lives of others, and in turn take lessons or unlearn lessons to lead a better, more meaningful life. After all, in the end, that’s what we are aiming for in this mortal world right? As the world grows siloed more and more, crawling behind the confines of the world wide web, or physical walls, our ability to do so has plummeted drastically. Unless you are taking active steps to build this around you – either in person or through an online community, you will find yourself with less information than needed to take a turn in life and avoid the downward spiral mentioned previously.

Back to resilience. There are controllable ways I guess of increasing your resilience and then there are tenets outside your control that are necessary to bring the strength and the grit that is necessary to survive and to thrive after you have entered this funk. The controllable ways are what you can find in popular self-help books – being disciplined, focusing on taking action, constantly moving, taking up hard projects that are right on the curve of interestingness, and so much more. These are changes that lead you to forget and forgive your trespasses in cognitive underbelly. These are changes that let action drive change and let you off dealing with this change that result as opposed to the inertial glut you may find yourself strangled with otherwise. 

The tenets outside your control are those that govern human interaction. Technically, these are controllable too, as any Stoic would tell profusely. 

“You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” Marcus Aurelius

But as things stand, and as capabilities in the modern world go, it’s a difficult thing to control. Human interactions are fraught with dangers like misunderstandings, translation errors, and over-indexing. These dangers lead one down a rabbit hole that is infused with big emotions such as hurt, anger, resentment, agony, regret, sadness, and anxiety. So we need to and must tread carefully. 

A good rule to keep in mind if you find yourself in such situations is to be present, with your mind and its wandering state, with your emotions and the havoc it can create if left untamed, and with your responses that can make or break a situation, as it would a relationship. Being conscious of your inner dialogue is good, but I have found it can be dangerous if taken anything further. This constant double checking of the experiences we feel around us through the meta lens of self-observation can lead one down the skepticism path, that is, lead on to question everything, and everyone around you. Which is not a good place to be. 

In movement lies the ultimate truth. 

Resilience is a state of mind. But harnessing it requires action. Tethering yourself to action, while minimizing the impact that outcomes have on your state of being lets you get ahead of hardships. You cannot beat them though. Hardships and suffering is not a bug but a feature of existence and cannot be wished away through action or belief. The best you can do is to curb its appeal in the innards of your mind and to dilute its intensity within your emotional system. Rest comes easy, as you would find with every step that you take. 

“Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”
— Nelson Mandela