What is resilience?

Simply put, it’s your ability to bounce back from the challenges that life throws your way. It’s you getting back up when you fall down, even when the odds seem to be stacked against you. Whatever life throws at you may appear daunting, but your will to recover will keep you moving and have you looking back at that trial marveling at your resolve and determination.

We have not talked about resilience enough. That is, not until our worlds got turned upside down in 2020, the year of the coronavirus pandemic and racial upheaval. The year the world stopped as we knew it. The year of the pivot; changing the way we did work, school, grocery shopping, recreation and travel.

  Music concerts were cancelled.
  Church services shifted online.
  Restaurants closed temporarily (and many permanently).

Throughout the months, the waves of stress and crisis kept coming. Civilian and police unrest boiled over across the world. The Black Lives Matter movement reintroduced itself through protests and murals painted on streets of cities across the world. We had never experienced such a unique time where we were all limiting our in-person connections with people to literally save our lives.

It’s been an unprecedented time. Yet there are silver linings within. All was not lost: despite our isolation, we became closer to the people we live with in our homes. We embraced technology to stay connected with those outside of our homes. Families improvised, introducing game nights and other regularly scheduled connections to ensure the well-being of loved ones living far away. We were forced into living life in a new way for far longer than anyone anticipated in March 2020. Through it all, we have had new opportunities to exercise our resilience, masked by the guise of just doing what we had to do. This, my friend, is the very definition of resilience.