Resilience is one of those words that always comes to my mind with a picture. It comes through almost in technicolor with a bright white light behind it and shiny, glinting letters. In essence, the word Resilience shows up in my mind as brilliance. So much so that you have to almost look away.
I’ve wondered if my mind just sort of meshed those two words - brilliance and resilience and gets a little confused but lately, I’ve realized that my mind isn’t confused at all.
Resilience means that you’ve gone through something and have made it out on the other side, usually better than when you started. That tough thing has been your purification process. It’s the rock tumbler that knocks off all of the dullness or the pressure deep within the earth that produces the diamond.
Being resilient doesn’t mean that the process was easy for you or that you even handled it well. Being resilient means that you just made it through and as a result, you got shined up. You have made it through and have become more brilliant. Whatever was keeping you from shining your brightest into the world before, that’s been knocked off. Through your process, you learned a lot about yourself - what you are capable of, what you won’t stand for, the ways in which you need to grow. And you took it all in. You were willing to stand in the arena, as Bréne Brown says, and persevere.
This last year has given all of us an opportunity for resiliency. In a way, living through the pandemic has even required that of us. My hope is that as we are able to be in community again, we are able to recognize the bright, shiny resilientness in each other. We’ve all been through it and some of the darkness has been knocked off and pressed out. We will emerge as beautiful, brilliant, radiant, resilient beings. I invite you to start looking for that radiance in people that you are able to re-meet for the first time in many months.
Much love,
Desirée
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