Resilience
Children have way more resiliency than the majority of their adult counterparts. I remember long, hot, Summer days of bike-riding and tree climbing in our small town in northern Illinois. I'd often come home with skinned knees, cuts, scrapes, and scratches.
"Where did you get that gash in your arm?"
My Mom would ask me this regularly.
I rarely knew where my wounds came from. It was standard for being outside. It could have been from the trees we climbed in the neighbor's yard. It could have been from some form of baseball we were playing in the empty lot up the street. It could have been from a crash while doing our bicycle version of the Indy 500 around the block.
There was just no telling.
As adults, it seems like we do remember every cut, scrape, ache, and pain. Physically -- sure, age makes you feel the burn in the morning a little more than it did at the tender age of nine.
We feel wounds of the emotional/relational kind more acutely, as well. While physical resilience wears down with age, emotional and relational resilience can grow. It should grow.
This is emotional intelligence.
It isn't necessary to know the source of every scar. People don't always want to hear our war stories, especially if that's how we've defined ourselves.
Leaders are resilient, but not in an unhealthy, stick-your-head-in-the-sand way.
