Emerging Stronger from Challenges and Uncertainty
“Remember this day, boys,” I said to my twin sons last week at breakfast. “Remember what it feels like to arrive at a milestone in your journey through challenges and uncertainties. It’s the last day of a difficult school year and you’ve done well. Remember that you chose to persist and grow throughout the year and now you’ve emerged stronger.”
I made those comments to my sons before the death of George Floyd in my city and the visceral and violent reactions that followed across our country. I’m thinking about what I said and trying to apply it now: persist and grow. For me, persisting and growing means I need to do more to observe, listen, build bridges, and oppose injustice.
We don’t know how long it will take to shift the systemic racial injustices in our community. Exacerbating those inequities, we don’t know when the pandemic and its terrible impact on community health and employment will end. We don’t know when job insecurity will end. We don’t know when painful relationships will heal. We don’t know when the anxiety or depression will pass.
Will you choose to persist and grow until you emerge stronger?
Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.” –John Maxwell
Life is hard. The question you and I have to ask ourselves right now is: Will we do hard things?
Sometimes we are thrust into doing hard things. I know an owner of six restaurants who had to shut them all down. Another friend is a pilot who’s been furloughed and has to acclimate to a dramatically different existence at home with his wife and young kids 24×7. Another friend had to bury his father last week. All so hard.
Other times, we’re forced to choose to do the hard thing. We must decide whether we’ll marshal our resources to emerge from change stronger and more capable. Will we do the hard thing — persist and grow — or will we remain comfortable?
Kahlil Gibran writes in The Prophet, “Have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master?”
Persisting and growing through change can be quite uncomfortable. Whether you do it will determine the outcome on your “last day of school.”
What Do You Want Your Last Day of School to Look Like?
Do you have a picture that describes your arrival at milestones in your life? What might it look like? What’s your 10-year, 5-year, 1-year, and 3-month picture? These are key questions because persistence and growth must be toward something. If it’s not a timeframe, perhaps it’s toward an outcome – like justice, reconciliation, restoration, healing, or completion.
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Alice asked, “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where,” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
You see, our actions shape our outcomes. We must choose to persist toward our desired destinations. We decide whether we grow to become the person we want to be. Vision is realized twice — in our minds as we imagine the future, and in our actions as we make it a reality.
Just as the last day of school will arrive, you and I will arrive at a place beyond our current challenges and uncertainties. The questions are:
What do you want that day to look like?
and
Will you persist and grow to make it happen?
Do it now. Write down the picture in your mind of where you want to go. Then decide what it will take to persist and grow toward that destination, despite all the challenges and uncertainties.
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