Who owns resilience?

Is the latest cultural buzzword a corporate metric or a red herring?

I have been struggling. No cap, as the kids apparently say. In this I am far from alone, as a quick Google search of the word “resilience” will confirm. Defined in most accessible terms as “the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness,” resilience is the smartphone of the new age. If you don’t have it, you need it, stat.

And if you do have it, maybe you should shut up about it because the rest of us are getting a little tired of hearing about it.

The emergence of resilience as the newest corporate buzzword followed, as did so many complex and awful things, the Covid 19 pandemic. For those just joining us, during the pandemic every aspect of life, education and business was upended, and new rules applied – often with alarming frequency and little notice. As we have lurched back from the abyss to something closer to “normal,” it is resilience that we as a culture lack. Thrown into chaos by something we couldn’t anticipate or control, we – most of us – survived to live another day. 

I feel like there are two large camps among us as survivors: Those who did surprisingly well in hindsight and those who suffered horribly. Those in the first group are unwilling to go back to pre-pandemic life and the values, mores and constraints associated with it. It’s a new world, and we need to embrace it. Those in the second group are unwilling to accept a new world and need to return to what they can only remember as the “good old days,” without compromise. While at it, some folks are trying to capitalize on this opportunity to regress to way before Covid.

I don’t want to sound like a textbook first-grouper, but there is no going back. The horse has left the barn. The genie is out of the bottle. The toothpaste is…you get the idea.

If that sounds like one group is doing, or should be doing, better than another, think again. I can confirm from completely unscientific research that everyone is on the spectrum. We are all broken. Academics, journalists and, God help us, HR people believe resilience is the problem, and the opportunity.

Twiggy was born in a crack house in West Philadelphia.

He never knew his mother, and when he was found he was the only living sibling among multiple brothers and sisters, strewn lifeless around him like trash.

Twiggy is my two-year-old tuxedo cat.

Don’t chuckle. Before you completely dismiss your horror just because he’s a cat, I assure you this is a cataclysmic way for any being to begin life. And it creates massive challenges down the road. When we adopted Twiggy he had been fostered for about a year in a loving home with a yippy dog, a couple cats and a revolving door of litters of cute, annoying kittens. Twiggy (so named because of how emaciated he was when he was found) formed an Odd Couple-ish relationship with a good-time-Tabby named Dennis, and was unwilling to consider any potential adoptive parents.

Every visit was the same: Adoptive parents would visit the house, informed in advance that Twiggy and Dennis were a package deal. Dennis would show up, show off, work the room, lay on the charm; and it worked. Twiggy would observe from the top of the stairs, glare, and retreat.

“We’ll take him,” they would say, indicating charming Dennis.

But the foster mom held firm, believing in her heart that Twiggy wouldn’t survive another loss of that magnitude. It was both, or neither.

Then my wife and I came along, looking very specifically for a bonded pair of cats. We knew the rescue from prior interactions and felt confident we would find the right pair. When we got to the foster house, we got the download on the full situation. Dennis went into full gigolo mode, and Twiggy watched us from the stairs as we were briefed.

Then a funny thing happened. Twiggy came down the stairs.

We did our best to ignore him. The only thing keeping us from holding our breath was a running dialog with the foster mom and constant attention from the yippy dog. Twiggy circled once, twice. The second time ‘round, my wife put her open hand casually behind her back and Twiggy shoved his face into her palm.

“He’s never done that before,” the mom observed.

And the deal was sealed.

That was a little over a year ago. Twiggy is – don’t get me wrong – an odd duck. There are things he never learned to do. He doesn’t know how to knead, for example. He kind of goose-steps. And when he is feeling very affectionate, he likes to chew, like a teething baby. Not to hurt; he purrs and purrs the whole time. But he is whole. He eats, sleeps, cleans, cuddles, knocks things off of high places and loves – loves – being picked up and cuddled tight. He also terrorizes his adoptive brother and former defender despite Dennis being larger and heavier than himself. While no longer emaciated, Twiggy doesn’t seem to have the chemistry or inner drive to bulk up. He’s healthy, though; we keep a close watch

.

In context, Twiggy is a miracle of resilience. With his origin story, had he been a human being, he would be an X-Man now. Instead, he is a mostly normal, happy-more-often-than-not member of my family. And he provides as much grace as he receives, though I doubt – as a cat – he can understand or appreciate that fact.

How did he do it? What did he do? Nothing, obviously; he had zero control over his circumstances, ever. How was he able to stay alive, stay aloof, decide when to jump onto the spinning world around him, and accept the gifts made available to him so that he could function in the world? How did he seemingly adapt and grow? How did he take lemons and emerge with lemonade?

Twiggy did it. It must be possible.

Aforementioned people, much smarter than I, have answers to these questions.

Individually, and in the educational system, there is a groundswell of support for mindfulness as a tool to boost resilience. Mindfulness is, “a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations without judgment.” Something so incredibly basic has never been more thoroughly explored and researched. I know: My wife actually did postgraduate work studying it and uses elements of it in her work.

I am more interested in the corporate response to the challenge of resilience, which is of course more complicated and nuanced than individual and educational pursuits. For one thing, it starts with the implied principle that employers are now somehow responsible for supporting resilience in their work force, and that – in order to claim resilient status themselves – they need to capture and document metrics in support of not only efforts to that end but also benefits therefrom. I may be showing my age here, but this seems illogical to me, bordering on unfair.

How is my employer responsible for my shaky mental-emotional state? It’s nice that I have resources made available to me that I can access. I know more than most about our employee assistance program (EAP) and as a professional I give it top marks. But it’s an employee benefit, something offered as a tool to aid in recruitment and retention of valuable and costly human capital.

To be sure, there are workplace issues that are triggering. Returning to the workplace from a remote or hybrid experience during and immediately following Covid is stressful. The destruction of what in many cases were tenuous borders between home and work to begin with is stressful.

But come on.

The ratio of work stressors to everything-else stressors hasn’t changed any. There’s global unrest, all-out war threatening to expand imminently and catastrophically. There’s political chaos, such that two out of every three news stories concerning the 2024 presidential race contain the word “unprecedented.”

And at home we have all the same challenges as before. We have kids who are aging and pulling mightily to escape our gravitational pull. We have parents who are aging and whose gravitational pull is increasing like that of a white dwarf. (According to NASA, the gravity on the surface of a white dwarf is 350,000 times that of gravity on Earth.) And then we have the unexpected little curve balls life tends to throw.

Like when you wake up while it’s still dark and step unwittingly in cold cat puke.

Like when a routine spring storm topples a tree that comes within inches of crushing your car, or worse.

Like when the spouse of a close friend passes away. It wasn’t sudden, or even really unexpected. In hindsight, where everything is mercilessly clear, there were roughly a thousand opportunities to engage, support, show up. At least a thousand. But something was always more important, more emergent. Other people found the time, or made the time. But I didn’t, and now that’s what I’m stuck with. A bed of shame I built for myself, and nowhere else to lay.

My friend has a journey before her. Her life is different now in ways I can only begin to imagine, and she will be called upon to be resilient. Her ability to be present and productive at work is only one small piece, the literal tip of an iceberg constructed almost entirely of trauma. By comparison, I should be skipping along the garden path, eating ice cream and thanking God for every awful burden I don’t have to shoulder today.

But I’m not skipping. I am, as I said, struggling. For that matter, no one I know is really skipping. Despite Twiggy’s concrete, powerful example, resilience feels like an unattainable trait. Admitting that is difficult. Admitting that feels like failure.

I don’t blame my employer, though, or look to the workplace for solace. I am possessive, absolutely miserly, with my blame. And, truth be told, not ready to take up the mantle of resilience.

Not yet.