Building Resilience

I don’t think I can pick one moment because most times the moments when you show strength are only obvious in retrospect. Over my life I have faced a number of challenges and I have either overcome them or learnt from them. That’s what life is all about. You never stop learning, often through setbacks and bad experiences, and you never face the same experience twice because if the situation repeats itself you are a different person and you sometimes approach the solution from a completely different angle. To look back and say that a particular event was the time you realised anything is just imposing a narrative after the event. The narrative may bear some relation to real life as it was but not to the extent that you think. Memory is a very fluid process and we choose what we remember, how we remember it and what lessons we decide to take from it, if any. Rather than looking for a specific incident or moment I am content to accept that I have grown, shown courage in some areas, though definitely not in others, and done the best I can. Anything else is just revisionism for the sake of it.