A Reflection on Human Resilience

On this day last year we brought home our baby from the NICU.

What a year!

We all receive messages from our children, usually messages we need to hear. This year, the message I needed to hear the most was that sometimes those who are the most vulnerable are also the most resilient.

A lot of my time is spent with people whose wounds are deep, but their capacity to heal is just as deep. Resilience is one of the greatest strengths we possess as human beings.

We always move forward. We have moved forward from the worst days in our personal and collective lives since the beginning and forward will always be the direction we go.

That doesn’t mean we ignore the pain. We have to pay attention to and address our own or others’ pain because pain is a signal. Without it, we don’t know to change.

Marveling at our child’s resilience meant we had to first look directly into scary realities. In looking at him through the sanitized walls of an incubator, we looked into a world where he could be forever set apart from others, a world where life might be painful, and even a world without him.

But that’s all of us. There are no children — or human beings of any age — for whom those scenarios aren’t inevitable. There always comes a time when we are alone, when we face more pain than seems bearable, and when the world goes on without us.

This year has been full of ups and downs, starts and stops, but our time in the NICU proved to us that those times of painful setbacks and anxious stagnation are temporary.

Our resilience is not.