Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life

by Eric Greitens

Resilience is the virtue of growing through suffering and struggle. Most mentors have earned their wisdom only because they have struggled themselves. So keep in mind that in great mentors, you’ll find more than expertise in their field. It’s likely that you’ll also find expertise in the practice of resilience.

Coaches, trainers, and teachers often have great power. Bad teachers and trainers believe that they have their power because of the position they hold. Good teachers and trainers know that the exercise of power is a responsibility: they are responsible for creating good results in the lives of those subject to their power and influence. Those results are what make their power legitimate.

There are no ironclad laws here, and most great leaders are people of contradictions. For many in my grandparents’ generation, Franklin Roosevelt was an icon of breezy confidence and effortless strength. They knew him as a smiling face on newsreels, as a confiding voice issuing from their radios for a fireside chat. But beneath the self-assured image was what the historian Garry Wills called “a consummate actor.” Just to appear to walk in public, Roosevelt, with his polio-stricken legs, would have to shift his weight from a cane on one side to the son who held him up on the other side.

The urgency that comes from the limited span of our lives pushes us to find meaning in the time we have. But fearing death, obsessing over it, staring directly at it, blinds us to the possibilities of living. The resilient person learns to live with the knowledge of death without being overcome by it.

We talked before about mental rehearsal and visualization. Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius believed in the importance of mentally rehearsing their own deaths. They recognized the role of fortune enough to know that it was impossible to predict the exact time or place they would die. At the same time, they knew that we can prepare for death, as we can prepare for any fearful thing.

What lives on is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what we have woven into the lives of others. Those who have lived with us become a part of us. We honor the dead by living their values. Through our efforts, we ensure that the good things they stood for continue to stand even when they are gone. Our actions become a living memorial to their memory. Your life carries forward the story of all those who shaped it for the good and who are now gone. And you can live in such a way that those after you will be proud to weave your life into their own.

And this is important: don’t think of this quiet as a way to “recharge” for the work in front of you. That may well be what happens, but to treat your Sabbath as a way to prepare for work is just another way of making the Sabbath work by another name. The Sabbath doesn’t exist for work.

If we’re resilient, we fill them with purpose, with meaning, with wisdom, and with work. And then on the Sabbath—whether it comes once a week at sunset or when you catch your breath looking in your new child’s eyes—we turn the crowded page, just as you can turn to the last page I’ll send you for now, and we rest.