It was disappointing not to make it to the top of that mountain.

After a year of planning, training, and imagining being on the top with everyone, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t make it up there. I’m not big on mentally planning for every possible scenario in order to insulate myself from disappointment, so it was hard to let go of how I thought it would look. Some days it still is, but I wouldn’t trade being all in, even when it turned out that I couldn’t. This past year of training, loving, and supporting each other was worth every step I could and couldn’t take.

It was hard to be left behind.

Who wants to cry uncle? Not this aunt of the four who made it to the top. However, they might never have been inspired to do it, if we hadn’t done it first. Because we had stood on the summit before, they were determined to stand up there now. Because we knew what it took to get to the top, they were better equipped to get there too.

It was difficult to accept that my body wasn’t able to do what I thought I’d trained it to do.

Looking back on it now, I can see that by staying behind in basecamp we were actually leading the way. By modeling a mature response to loss and disappointment, maybe they will remember what that looks like when faced with their own inevitable losses and disappointments. Wisdom, it seems, is sometimes best gained through loss.

We are meant to pass the torch, and to find a new home for the truth that lives inside of us, so that it can live on without us.

Over the next few weeks I will be focusing on a word of the day drawn from a list created at the beginning of January. Each word was chosen to serve as a guide to inspire and inform my steps through 2020. If you are just joining me now and want to look in on earlier posts on this topic, you will find links to each at the end.

Good writing, but a little too “self congratulatory” was my husband’s response after reading RESILIENT. In it I told the story of summiting and surviving an unexpected night on Mt. Adams. Tom is one of my most trusted feedback providers, and as such I work to listen with more curiosity than defensiveness. Always a growing edge for me.

This morning over coffee in the pre-dawn light, defensiveness won the first round. As a female, I was raised to keep my strengths, intelligence, and strong opinions under wraps. His comments about the tone of my post smacked of that early upbringing. He was told from his earliest years never to toot his own horn, and the tenor of my words sounded like boasting. Our morning heart-to-heart was a convergence of our early messaging. Curiosity eventually won the match, and our conversation evolved into all of the ways resilience can manifest in our lives, including the willingness to receive and reflect on feedback when it is of the more “constructive” nature.

Divorce, death of loved ones, financial hardship, broken trust, the loss of a job, unrealized dreams, failure in front of our peers, being passed over for a promotion, fighting injustice, crafting meaningful lives, taking on our own inner demons, fostering authentic relationships, strenuous exercise, living with debilitating health conditions, or the Seattle Seahawks losing a game they fought relentlessly to win. We are all daily surrounded with opportunities to practice being resilient. Some small, some large, and some that feel insurmountable. When we practice being resilient in the face of the small, the more equipped we are for the large, which is what readies us when faced with the seemingly insurmountable.

Onward.

(And for the recored, I am pretty damn proud of summiting and surviving an unexpected night on a mountain. Just sayin’)