On bouncing back better
and trusting in the process
I’ve been thinking about resilience lately. What it means to feel more stiff than usual— not just physically, but mentally and spiritually.
It’s Sunday morning and I’m drinking my coffee in bed and looking out the window. My spouse Janyce is beside me drinking hers. I’m watching our new neighbor as she takes her dogs out to the backyard to do their business one at a time. It’s early and the sun is just beginning to rise.
“Do you think she can see us as clearly as we see her?” I say.
Janyce looks up from her laptop. “Is that a fourth dog?” she says. “There’s the big white one, and a medium one, and then that little guy with the long tail. And now a pug!”
“Wow, four dogs” I say. “And that house isn’t very big.”
We’re rubbernecking into our new neighbor’s space while multitasking in ours. Janyce is shopping online and I’m making a list for the remaining things we need to do before the family arrives for Sunday dinner.
“You want more coffee?” I say.
“We’ve got to take the girl out for a walk first,” says Janyce.
I look over at Swirly who is lying on her side at the foot of the bed and decide we have time for more coffee, so I grab our cups and head into the kitchen. Yesterday we washed the windows and now I can clearly see the brilliant morning with the sun illuminating the yellow maple and setting the dogwood tree ablaze. I have been worried about this tree. It didn’t produce any flowers this summer and this fall it took a long time to begin changing color. Come to think of it, it didn’t produce any berries for the birds, either. I guess maybe the tree was conserving energy during the drought. But look at it now! It might actually be coming back again.
I’ve been thinking about resilience lately. What it means to feel more stiff than usual— not just physically, but mentally and spiritually. The French performance artist Yoann Bourgeois uses a trampoline in a beautiful metaphor for resilience. It takes him many tries to get to the top of the staircase and some of his efforts look like reaching and yearning while others are balletic and effortless. And isn’t that always the way? Some days, everything is hard. But other days, if I can manage to tap back into a flow state, things work out with ease. I love watching this video because the dancer performing is not a young man, and yet his body is lithe and limber. It’s a hopeful commentary on aging, I think.
Martha Beck describes it another way. In her podcast she talks about a certain phenomenon of “bouncing back” that happens to all of us. It could be after an illness, or a breakup, a big relocation somewhere, or even simply getting past the pandemic (honestly, it could be anything). According to Martha, the best thing about being low is knowing that very soon you’re going to come back up again. It’s physics. That’s the bounce. And how you experience the bounce is the part that makes all the difference. Bouncing back better and with more resilience from whatever has held you down means you do it slowly and you don’t try to rush the process. You also do nothing to make it happen, you just let it happen, and you do it lovingly, by giving yourself some grace for all of your feelings, and then finally you look for the opportunity that will present itself at the top of a bounce back.
I’m still standing at the sink when Janyce walks into the kitchen with her phone pressed to her ear. I can hear one side of the conversation and it’s clear to me that our family dinner is on the verge of being cancelled. “Do you need me to drive you to see your doctor tomorrow to look at your foot?” she says. “No, it’s okay dad, things happen.”
I walk over to the table that I set yesterday and start putting the silver flatware away, and stacking the plates to carry back to the kitchen cabinets.
“We could bring the meal to them?” I say.
Janyce pauses in her conversation and looks directly at me. “What about if we come to you?” she says into the phone. “We’ll bring everything. Yes, we’ll bring a tablecloth, we’ll bring the meal fully cooked…” her voice starts trailing as she takes the phone with her into another room. I open the door to the garage and find a box for the wine and the glasses, the flowers and the candles. One by one, I fill up the box to the top with all the contents of the table. Swirly comes walking in to the kitchen, her nails clicking on the floor, picking up her head to show me her teeth in a goofy grin. I look at the clock and we have just enough time to cook the food in the oven before the drive.
“Time for a walkie?” I say to my dog who is at my feet wiggling her little stump of a tail. “Let’s do it!”