Resilience is knowing what to keep and what to let go

For an upcoming transatlantic move, I prepare to shed the skins of what I once was to reveal what might come next.

I’m packing up my life, stashing resilience in my back pocket. In two months I move to Barcelona. It’s my new start, discovering what comes next after Wife and Caregiver. In returning to Europe, my home for over two decades, I will be living closer to my daughters. My wintering this year is not for burrowing down but for unburdening myself, preparing for flight.

The word "resilience" comes from the Latin verb resilire, which means "to rebound,” from re- "back" + salire "to jump, leap." The act of springing back or rebounding. It’s my Big Leap, as I wrote about in April, conquering fear to move into my “zone of genius”: my ability to convey through my words what is in my heart and soul and to connect with other hearts and souls through that gift. In other words, give it all up to the Big Dream. If not now, then when?

Living up to a dream is rarely as important as entering it for all it has to teach. —Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Knowing you're ready for the next big leap

It’s so much easier to take that kind of leap when you are not weighed down. I’m determined to travel with no more than a couple of suitcases, reducing my possessions to a few boxes of books, photos and journals that I will ship ahead. I need the resilience. I’ve moved a lot in my life—lived in three countries, in multiple homes in each one, and in the last two years in Florida moved three times. But for this move, the only possessions I will keep are those that reaffirm my sense of belonging in the world, talismans of what I once was and what I might still be.

A poster I purchased a year ago from the lovely artist and writer Morgan Harper Nichols, here on Substack. My mantra for 2024 and beyond.

Words travel light

The words will come with me. The diaries and journals I’ve kept since I was ten years old, the record of a life I felt compelled to keep from a young age. The beloved collections of poetry, books of wisdom and inspiration, and the novels I know I will reread for pleasure and to study the secrets of these writers’ particular magic. All the stories, yours and mine: they are the path to resilience.

I Want to Write Something So Simply
Mary Oliver

I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it
and as you read
you keep feeling it
and though it be my story
it will be common,
though it be singular
it will be known to you
so that by the end
you will think—
no, you will realize—
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself,
out of your heart
had been saying.

That girl lives within me still

But what to do with my wedding album? I look at that twenty-nine-year-old woman in her Jessica McClintock dress with the big sash in the back, in her ‘80s perm, holding a bouquet of pink roses. Her face is lit with love and expectation, next to her tall Swedish husband. I love that young woman’s innocence. I do not regret any of the choices she made. She did her best. She walked a path alongside her husband for as long as she could. The wedding album won’t come with me, but there’s no need. I tuck away in my heart my fondness for that girl on her wedding day, for her seemingly bottomless capacity to love and dream and hope. That girl lives within me still. She is resilient.

Wedding day, August, 1989

The young self, the child. Photographs from 60 years ago. These will come with me. Gazing fondly at this young me, I am reminded that I must always pay attention to her needs. In the often ego-driven adult self, she is too easily cast aside.

In the last two years I have been spending a lot of time with that inner child, the younger me, through my work in The Whole Soul Way. I’ve gained an understanding of Inner Family Systems, through the work of Dr. Richard Schwartz. IFS conceives of every human being as a system of protective and wounded inner parts led by a core Self. In inner child work, there is the opportunity to heal emotional wounds and traumas from our childhood for our emotional and psychological wellbeing as adults.

My childhood was happy in the most important ways; I was safe with and protected by loving parents. But no matter how stable our childhoods, as children we learn coping mechanisms, patterns of behavior that we believe will win us love and belonging and safety. At some point in my childhood I absorbed the idea that to earn love I must be the good girl, I must please others before myself, I must be quiet and not call too much attention to myself. I must not be greedy and want what isn’t mine to have.

I have come so far in exploring that shadow self. Today this little girl-woman has learned to please herself, to make herself big and boisterous when she needs to. She wants what she wants. She knows she is as worthy and deserving as any other human. This, too, is the resilience I will carry within as I travel onwards.

Me at age 4, in 1964. I still feel my mother clipping that barrette in my hair.

Mother and child: If we’re lucky, a bond that will not fray

The photographs of my mother as a little girl, as a young woman, as a twenty-eight-year-old mother of three children under the age of six. She will come with me in all of these captured moments, but mostly in my heart. I used to wonder how I would ever survive without my mother in the world—this earthly world. Our special bond was the ballast that gave me room to explore. I could always find the earlier versions of myself with her. When she was diagnosed with dementia, our roles reversed. I mothered my mother; she looked for my help as a child would. Yet despite that shift in our relationship, our bond did not fray. It grew stronger, borne of both pain and love. The story of our shared resilience, hers and mine, is one of my most durable possessions. With her example, I learned to mother well, too. Not perfectly—there is no such thing. Rather, I learned to be a mother who loves with every ounce of her imperfect heart.

“There is no house like the house of belonging.”—David Whyte

My mother Freda, age 6. That playful twinkle in her eyes never changed.

On one of my mother’s many visits to Sweden.

Pack light, I hear my mother saying, in the words of her favorite singer Frank Sinatra: “Pack up, let's fly away!! Pack a small bag.”

Mary Oliver in her poem “In Blackwater Woods” offers the ultimate “packing light” advice:

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Enjoy this week’s Living in 3D song selections

From “Wicked,” now a beautiful movie, these lyrics in particular speak to me:

Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I'm through with playing by the rules of someone else's game
Too late for second-guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts
Close my eyes and leap

It's time to try defying gravity
I think I'll try defying gravity
And you can't pull me down

And another favorite, from Rising Appalachia:

I am resilient

I trust the movement

I negate the chaos

Uplift the negative

I’ll show up at the table, again and again and again

I’ll close my mouth and learn to listen

LET’S CHAT! Perhaps you, too, this winter, are putting down some of what you carry in order to enter the new year lighter and more hopeful, with greater wholeness. Please share in the comments. And tell me, what does resilience mean to you?

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