MayBE 2023: Day Five.

“Fall down seven times, stand up eight.”
― Japanese Proverb

I think it takes courage to be optimistic – to be able to balance optimism with real world constraints.

I wrote this four years ago and I believe it now more than ever:

This is our legacy of being human – being optimistic to build resilience.

Resilience = Optimism + Grit

Resilience can’t be achieved without facing challenges that make you uncomfortable and courageously rising up after failures.

– Me, 2019

I have watched my children be uncomfortable – things were too challenging or not challenging enough (feeling bored is also a form of resilience). When they have learned that they are, as William Ernest Henley wrote so powerfully in his poem Invictus, the masters of their fate and the captains of their soul, life does not happen to them, it happens through them. The falls are cushioned with the knowing that they know how to stand up again and again, and it is my job to model it with my own choice to to stay optimistic that I too, will always rise.

TODAY’S PROMPT:

Take 15 minutes to reflect on RESILIENCE.

  • Write about an experience in your life that made you resilient.
  • Copy the poem below or another quote on resilience.
  • Draw/paint what resilience means to you.

OPTIMISM

by Jane Hirshfield

“More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam

returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous

tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,

it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.

But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,

mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.”


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