Resilience Part 4: Growth Through Suffering

Growth rarely comes pain-free.

Infants wail from the pain of teething. Young children’s knees and joints ache with literal growing pains. A weightlifter’s training regime is made up of days on and off -- tearing their muscle fibers with every repetition set requires days in between sessions to heal before they continue their growth.

Sports players sweat, sprain, break, and bleed for their wins. We learn what makes relationships strong and healthy as we accumulate them, wrestle with them, and, often, move beyond them.

Screwing up makes us fight harder with the need to succeed the next time. We come to understand the value of what is most precious to us through the threat of its loss.

Growing isn’t easy. It requires bravery to change. It requires effort to continue to engage, reinvest, rework, show up, trust, love, work, and try. We do not always hit our target, but we will learn something through our persistence.

Many of us have spent a year actively growing through the suffering of the effects that a pandemic and economic crises can put us through. Most of us have. Surviving the pandemic and the damage it has done to our businesses, families, and financial situations is a demonstration of that growth.

We were challenged turn by turn to bow to defeats, and time after time, we chose to get back up off the ground and fight some more. With every stumble and tumble, we re-evaluated and tried again: a new plan, a new idea, a new pivot, a new option. We further diversified, rallied, and showed up for our neighbors, donated to charities, and cast our ballots.

We are swiftly approaching the one-year anniversary of a collection of events that brought about massive change to every person on the planet. The cost has been heartbreaking, the suffering: catastrophic.

But our growth?

Our stamina?

Our resilience?

This, too, is world-changing.