I’ve started working out with a weighted vest, a training tool that is pretty much like it sounds. A vest with individual pockets into which weights can be added, 3 pounds at a time. A way to incrementally add effort to any activity, with each additional weight block my workout is initially harder. But after some time at that increased weight, I’m ready to add more.

The weight vest strikes me as a particularly practical metaphor. Just as my vest adds effort to my physical body in order to strengthen it, life seems to have a way of adding weight to help me develop greater inner strength too.

Every courageous conversation strengthens us for the next one.

Every difficult decision readies us for the ones still to come.

Every obstacle overcome prepares us to take on new ones.

Every time we take on the hard work of mending what’s broken in our hearts, we increase our capacity to love wholeheartedly.

Every courageous step emboldens us to take the next one.

Maybe what is true of a weight vest is true of the rest of life too. Added effort today strengthens us for what life brings our way tomorrow.

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’)