Resiliency, Resiliently
In February 2017 as I was approaching my 5th surgery in 6 years, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. Wondering what I had done to deserve this run of health challenges. If you asked anyone who knew me, they would say I’m the healthiest person they knew. Yet here I was about to go under the knife again, this time to repair my vocal cords that had been severely damaged from teaching spin classes. I literally wondered if I’d tortured cats in a previous life or something equally terrible to experience, what felt like, an unending wave of bad luck. This article is not about my spiritual journey but that did happen to coincide with this year. When I realized what I was doing (and believing) wasn’t working and was no longer serving me I became interested in learning if a force bigger than myself existed. Through this journey I realized that life was happening FOR me, not TO me as I had thought before. That every single set back was a set up for something to come in my life. Yes, I had demonstrated resiliency in life, in health and in business during the first 37 years of my life, but this new understanding is what defined my story of resiliency. That if I could flip my perspective, even in the toughest and darkest of times, to know with full faith that this experience is teaching me, stretching me, revealing me, then I would be ok no matter what.
Like the bicep, resiliency is a muscle. You must be torn down to build back stronger each time. And every time you get to the other side and look back on where you’ve just come from, you acquire a little bit more confidence about how you will be able to take on the next challenge coming your way. We cannot avoid life. Rather, if you want to live an engaged, fulfilled, expansive life, you must walk through the hard times and hard experiences. Those are what give you perspective on how incredible life and its blessings are. The view at the top of the mountain is only beautiful because you can see from where you came. But the good news is a muscle can always be strengthened and resiliency can continue to improve day by day and step by step. I don’t know about you, but I’m trying to make it to as many mountaintops as possible in this lifetime, even if that means enduring the climb.