“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
― Joseph Campbell
Four times this week I’ve told the story of my ‘big’ accident from my childhood. Not randomly but in the context of my current (and healing) bad back which was caused by my falling over somewhat spectacularly in the woods behind our house two weeks ago. I was on a dog walk and I fell because of the residual habits formed post the ‘big’ accident (for those interested in these things the dog completely ignored me and carried on trying to retrieve sticks from the leat).
The short version of my ‘big’ accident is a half jokey explanation about falling through a greenhouse. When I was 8 years old, I fell through the greenhouse in my friend’s back yard, sliced my leg open from inner to outer thigh necessitating 84 stitches: 61 inside, 23 out. The scar is still visible (looks like a shark took a chunk of my leg for a snack) and wraps around my leg seven or eight inches below my backside. As a consequence of this accident, I had to re-learn to walk properly spending a whole year walking on the toes of my right foot. My mother cried when I ran to her down the street, both feet flat, almost a year to the day of the accident like a crumpled working-class version of Chariots of Fire.
So, the reason I’m telling the story of the ‘big’ accident now is because walking in this toe way on the right foot for a year has created a point of vulnerability on how I move about – ever since the accident I’ve been careful about where I put my feet, and the second I’m not careful, especially on dodgy terrain, it doesn’t end well. This can also happen when I’m tired. Or busy in the head. This tendency to fall over or trip over my feet can be a bit alarming to friends and colleagues. This time when I was out in the woods with our stick obsessed dog on my own, I spectacularly prat-fell, feet sliding from under me and landed hard on the coccyx, whilst simultaneously my bum hit a stone. My legs ended up under a bridge!
There is a moment when you lie there and mentally check everything is still in order and working. There’s a moment when you’re not entirely sure you can still move.
I could and I did. Gingerly. And now, two weeks later and post osteopathy I’m finally moving more normally again.
So why am I telling this story (again) and what does it have to do with resilience? Because the ‘big’ accident is a story that creates the foundation to my ability to bounce back which I feel I am pretty good at. I am, I think, the eternal optimist and probably quite annoying to hang out with if you’re not! But the thing is once you’ve eventually recovered from an extreme difficulty, like my ‘big’ accident, you start to believe that you can come back from most things.
I think resilience – like inclusion – is a word that has lost its way a bit, especially in the arts and cultural sector, because it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll always hang tough, or that the things that you put in place to enhance survival or bounce-back-ability will work, either. Yes you can say you’ll adopt certain things or behave in certain ways but you do actually have to do them.
It does mean, on a personal level at least, that you know you can come back after a major setback, that nothing lasts forever or is insurmountable and that you can manage yourself to navigate the challenges that life throws up. Even if you’re fundamentally changed by the process. Even if you’re not exactly as you were before the setback or difficulty happened. You have in fact got all the resources you need within you. As Camus says, “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
I cannot begin to count how many times I have told the story of the ‘big’ accident and my encounter with the greenhouse in my life time or why I was up there (doing my good deed for Googy Cundall) or how many times I’ve made the same joke about never doing it again (ha ha), but something really shifted in my understanding of the impact of the accident when I talked to the osteopath about it whilst discussing my back, this week. Telling a story like the ‘big’ accident while not rote exactly is as familiar to me as putting on my favourite shirt. So, I got to the bit where I say, “And so I tend to be very careful about where I put my feet.”
And the osteopath said, “You look down?”
“Usually…” I answered, “particularly on dodgy terrain.”
“Do you always do that?” she asked me with just a hint of incredulity to which the answer is, well, yes. Yes, I am in the habit of looking at my feet when I’m out walking the dog in the countryside or on the coastal path etc. I hadn’t - until that point – understood how I’d adjusted my behaviour to accommodate my clumsiness. And that’s the potential hidden side effect of resilience, you’re so used to coping, you just do it. And you only slip-up when, for some reason (in this case, God help me, I was thinking about a power point) you don’t do the automatic coping, and then WHAM! Arse over tit.
There’s a wide implication of course, about life-changes: all the big ones – birth, death, illness, job-shift etc. and being resilient as you encounter or live through each but ensuring (and assuming) that you’ve formed some of the habits of resilience even when you didn’t know you were doing it, I think, can make all the difference.
If it’s possible to get through one challenging thing, even if it has scarred you, you can go again. And again. Ultimately, you have it within you to tackle whatever is thrown in your path.