Toughness and Resilience

 

 I've always wanted to be strong. I looked up to strong people and always wanted to have a level of strength and toughness that I felt I lacked in my life. To me, there is a difference between toughness and resilience. I look at toughness as the amount of stress and trial one can take before they break or capitulate. 

     I look at resilience as the amount of times someone can recover and the quickness of the recovery after capitulating or breaking.

  By this definition I am much more resilient than I am tough. I'm kind of a comeback kid. It's easy to kick me down, but keeping me down can prove to be a continuous and unceasing process. I am going to get back up again and again and again until something finally finishes me off.  That hasn't happened yet.  Something in me has always prevented me from throwing in the towel for good in life, and I keep fighting and keep getting back up even though I have no idea why I keep entering in the match. 

     I guess I'm a sucker for punishment because I routinely get my ass kicked, but I guess that's the big difference between toughness and resilience. Toughness can help you win battles, but resilience helps you win the end game.  You can be tough and withstand a lot of strain, stress, and trial, before you break, but once you do break resilience can be more elusive for someone whose toughness made resilience not as necessary. Resilient people just don't know how to quit. 

 Resilient people can get brutalized, defeated, left for dead, and crippled, but they keep getting back up to face the life they have been given and the struggle they have to endure even in the face of repetitive defeats. The thing about resilience is the more you get back up after a knockdown, the easier and easier it is to continue to get back up. Eventually you win a few battles here and there, but that's because you didn't give up. The key to resilience is simple. 

Don't give up. 

Even in the face of depression, doubt, and failure, just don't give up.   Eventually you will get somewhere, and that somewhere might have some really green grass. 

The biggest difference between toughness and resilience is that tough people aren't always resilient. Many of them don't need to be.  Toughness is endurance under stress. Resilience is the quickness and consistency of recovery after a break. 

 I never considered myself a super tough guy. I have broken very easily in the past. I do consider myself resilient, though. I keep bouncing back.

 I don't want to give up. 

If I give up, I miss the fireworks so to speak. 

I've quit things before in my life, and many of them I deeply regret doing so. I don't like quitting, but sometimes I felt like I just couldn't win, and so I stopped trying, but in life, in my journey into the infinite and through this life into eternity, giving up on life is truly the only way you lose. God doesn't want me to quit, and if he doesn't want me to quit, I am not going to quit. 

 Every time I get my ass kicked, I am going to lick my wounds, pick myself up, and head into battle again. I am going to do this over and over and over again until I win or achieve something valuable, or until I die. 

 I don't care what mistakes I've made, what sins I have committed, how many times I failed, how many friends I have lost, or what the world is coming to, I am going to face this life head on win or lose, and keep facing it until death claims me no matter how many times I get knocked down. 

That's resilience. 

Resilience can foster and ingrain toughness.  If you are resilient, you'll end up being tough in the end.