Musings on Resilience
How to convey the meaning of resilience? Stories. For stories are the very best way to communicate resilience – as well as other core values such as courage, compassion, perseverance, honesty, generosity, humility, and hope.
Why? Our brains are, quite simply, inclined to take in our most important ideas and moral principles through the context of stories. The more authentic and genuinely moving those stories are, the deeper those ideas will affect our lives and worldviews. When we inhabit the minds of characters and experience their challenges – even though those characters and challenges may be utterly imaginary – we learn about the power of those characters’ choices, the anguish of their moral dilemmas, the limits of mortality, and the qualities we share with people who might at first seem very different from ourselves.
It’s no accident that diverse people and cultures around the world have long embedded their most cherished values and ways of understanding the world within stories. That has been true throughout history and it remains true today. How those stories are ultimately shared doesn’t matter, whether that happens around a crackling fire or in a theater or on a computer screen or in an epic poem or through a book. We are all fluent in the language of story.
Paradoxically, while we humans are dangerously proficient in sowing division and antagonism among ourselves, we are equally proficient in telling stories that can truly bind us together. For stories have the magical ability to leap across all the boundaries of language, culture, religion, geography, and time – to connect people of any era, any place, and any description. And that’s not all: Stories that are richly imagined and vividly told can also connect us to the other, nonhuman creatures and elements that inhabit the same world as we do, our companions on the Earth’s continuing journey around the sun.
The nexus of that connection is deeply mysterious. After decades of laboring to write books, I still don’t comprehend the wondrous links between story and self, shared reality and imagination, fleeting dreams and enduring ideas. What I have learned, though, is that stories carry a great power – the power to remind us all of our highest ideals as well as our common experiences. In a world that’s too often painful, distracted, and divided, that power can give us unending wonder, context, healing, understanding, and inspiration.
And yes, resilience.
