A Resilient Life: You Can Move Ahead No Matter What

by Gordon MacDonald

“I want to make your practice painful,” he would say, “so that the race will be a pleasure.” It was his way of reminding us that life is full of occasional hardships. We should get used to it. Self-discipline was an issue in every part of life, in little things as well as big. One minute, self-discipline might mean pushing to break a personal record on the track. In another moment, it might be a matter of seemingly insignificant details.

Developing resilience is demanding, mostly done in secret, often humbling, not always fun. For me the foundation for understanding and applying this principle had been laid on the track and cross-country course. For five days of the week, we worked out, sometimes twice, maybe three times a day, and the experience could be a grueling one.

an unrepaired past doesn’t go away. It remains and speaks up and into the present of our life-journeys.

Years before meeting Mandela, I had interviewed a man who had been imprisoned with him on Robben Island for five years. “We had rooms [cells] next to each other,” he told me. “What did he teach you?” I asked. “He taught us to forgive,” came the answer. “I was a bitter young man, and Mandela picked it up immediately when we first met. He said to me, ‘Son, you are of no use to our movement until you learn to forgive the white man. You can hate his cause, but you cannot hate him.’”

Elton Trueblood wrote: Acceptance of discipline is the price of freedom. The pole vaulter is not free to go over the high bar except as he disciplines himself rigorously day after day. The freedom of the surgeon to use his drill to cut away the bony structure, close to a tiny nerve without severing it, arises from a similar discipline. It is doubtful if excellence in any field comes in any other way. John Milton was revealing something of his own creative power when he wrote, “There is nothing in the world of more grave and urgent importance throughout the whole life of man than is discipline.3