Beyond Grinding Through: What Actually Sustains Resilience

I woke up thinking about false binary narratives again. It's become something of a pattern for me - noticing all the ways we fragment experience into incompatible opposites, as if life operates in clean either/or categories.

This morning, my thoughts eventually led me back to a specific moment during my mom's funeral. My brother and I had become what we now recognized as "the senior generation" - a shift we hadn't quite processed yet. We were talking with people, sharing memories of Mom, doing what you do at these gatherings. At one point, someone said something that made me laugh. Really laugh.

For a moment, I caught myself. How dare I have joy during such a sad time in my life - don't I care?

And then I thought better. Of course I cared. The grief was real and deep. But so was the laughter. So were the warm memories. So was the love we were sharing in that room. My capacity to laugh didn't diminish my grief - if anything, it was part of how I was processing it. How I was staying intact while holding something so heavy.

Grit or Give In: The Resilience Binary

We've absorbed a particular narrative about resilience, haven't we? When times are dark, we must hunker down. Be serious. Be grim. Focus on getting through it. Joy becomes frivolous. Wonder becomes tone-deaf. Lightness feels like a betrayal of the gravity of the situation.

And it goes both ways. If we allow ourselves joy, we're not taking things seriously enough - we're not caring enough. But if we maintain warm connections with family or friends who see the world differently than we do, we're caring too much about keeping peace and not enough about standing firm. Either way, we've failed the test of appropriate seriousness.

The message is clear: real resilience looks like stoic endurance. Gritting your teeth. Grinding through. Keeping your head down and your emotions in check until you emerge on the other side.

Ironically, the Stoic philosophers we reference when we talk about "stoic endurance" weren't advocating for emotional shutdown at all. They were teaching the practice of observing experience without being consumed by it - staying present to what is without fragmenting into what we fear it means. But somewhere along the way, we've translated their wisdom into something much more rigid: grit your way through or give in entirely.

But what if this narrative is incomplete? What if, in our determination to care enough about what's happening in the world, we're actually not caring enough about the aspects of ourselves - our whole wellbeing - that would allow us to sustain that care? What if the resilience we're seeking requires something we've been taught to suppress?

Admiral James Stockdale spent nearly eight years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. When asked later how he survived when so many others didn't, he described what's now known as the Stockdale Paradox: "You must never confuse faith in the fact that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality."

Viktor Frankl, surviving Nazi concentration camps, observed something similar. In Man's Search for Meaning, he wrote about prisoners who found ways to notice beauty - a sunset through barbed wire, a kind gesture, a moment of connection. Those who could hold both the horror of their reality AND these moments of transcendence had a better chance of surviving with their humanity intact.

Neither man advocated for denial or toxic positivity. They weren't suggesting people ignore the darkness or pretend everything was fine. They were witnessing something more nuanced: the capacity to hold multiple truths simultaneously is itself a survival skill. They could hold despair AND hope. Horror AND beauty. Suffering AND wonder.

The brilliance of what these men discovered is that by finding ways to maintain their wholeness - to stay connected to beauty, meaning, and wonder even within their brutal circumstances - they remained mentally and emotionally strong. And as their bodies endured unimaginable harm, this integrated mindset actually supported their physical resilience. The capacity to hold multiple truths simultaneously - to stay intact as whole humans rather than fragmenting under extreme pressure - was itself what sustained them.

Now, our circumstances are nothing like POW camps or concentration camps - and that's precisely the point. If maintaining wholeness was crucial for survival in the most extreme conditions imaginable, how much more possible is it for us in our everyday struggles? The principle scales: whether facing existential horror or the grinding weight of difficult times, fragmentation weakens us while integration sustains us.

What Actually Sustains Us

So what does this look like for us now, in circumstances far less extreme but nonetheless heavy?

Joy and awe aren't escapes from darkness - they're how we metabolize it.

Joy and awe aren't escapes from darkness - they're how we metabolize it. Here's what I believe: resilience without joy doesn't actually work. Not for the long haul. Not in a sustainable way.

When darkness consumes us so completely that there's no room left for joy, wonder, or awe - when we're so overwhelmed by circumstances and cultural climate that these things simply fall away - we don't become more resilient. We become more brittle. We lose connection to the very things that remind us why we're staying in the fight. Why it matters. Why we remain intact rather than fragmenting under the weight.

Joy isn't a luxury we afford ourselves when things are going well. It's part of how we stay whole when things aren't. Awe - that sense of connection to something larger than ourselves - isn't a distraction from the work. It's what prevents us from losing ourselves entirely to the darkness. It reminds us we're part of a living system that's bigger and more enduring than this particular moment of difficulty. Wonder isn't frivolous. It's how we maintain enough flexibility to imagine different possibilities. To see beyond what is to what might be.

This is the both-and space we need right now. Not grinding determination OR joy. Not grim focus OR wonder. Both. Simultaneously. The capacity to face hard truths while remaining connected to what sustains us.

Nature doesn't "grit through" winter by shutting down all signs of life and beauty. Yes, there's dormancy. Yes, there's conservation of energy. But there's also the stark beauty of bare branches against winter sky. The surprise of birds finding food where we thought nothing could grow. The first green shoots that somehow emerge while snow still lingers. Nature integrates. It holds the dormancy AND the beauty. The stillness AND the preparation for spring. The apparent death AND the hidden life continuing beneath the surface.

This might look like noticing the way afternoon light falls across your kitchen table while you're also holding worry about the future. Or feeling genuine delight at your dog's enthusiasm while simultaneously carrying grief. Or laughing with your child at dinner even though the world feels heavy. These aren't contradictions - they're evidence that you're still intact, still capable of the full range of human experience.

We need this same integration now. Not the false choice between taking the world's darkness seriously OR allowing ourselves moments of joy and wonder. Not the belief that caring deeply means living grimly.

The question isn't whether we can afford joy and awe right now. It's whether we can afford to fragment ourselves by setting them aside.

The question isn't whether we can afford joy and awe right now. It's whether we can afford to fragment ourselves by setting them aside. Whether we can sustain the grinding resilience we've been taught to value without the very things that keep us human, flexible, connected to what matters.

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I think of that moment at my mom's funeral - that laugh that came naturally, unbidden, followed by the brief thought that I was doing something wrong. Then came the recognition that I wasn't.

My capacity to feel multiple things at once - grief and joy, loss and love, sadness and gratitude - wasn't a failure of appropriate emotion. It was evidence that I was still whole. Still human. Still capable of the full spectrum of experience even in the midst of loss.

That's the resilience we actually need. Not the grinding kind that eventually breaks us. But the integrating kind that keeps us intact - connected to ourselves, to each other, to something larger that sustains us through the darkness.

What's true for me is this: when we allow ourselves to remain intact like this - to hold both the darkness and what sustains us - we actually have more to offer the world we're trying to care for. Fragmentation doesn't make us more effective at creating the change we want to see. Integration does. When we maintain our connection to joy, wonder, and awe alongside our clear-eyed engagement with what's difficult, we bring our whole selves to the work. We create ripples that extend beyond our own wellbeing into the larger systems we're part of.

This isn't about forcing joy or manufacturing wonder when they're not there - that becomes just another form of pressure, another "should" we're failing to meet. And sometimes we're so depleted that nothing arises naturally at all - that numbness itself is worth honoring, not fixing. It's about not actively shutting them out when they do arise naturally. Not catching yourself and saying "how dare I." It's different from gratitude practices that can feel performative or forced. This is simpler: just permission to notice what's actually there alongside the difficulty. Permission to stay whole rather than fragmenting into only what feels appropriately serious.

So perhaps the practice isn't about choosing between seriousness and joy, between engagement and sustenance, between caring for the world and caring for ourselves. Perhaps it's about giving ourselves permission to experience the full spectrum - trusting that our capacity to laugh at a funeral or feel wonder in dark times isn't evidence that we don't care enough. It's evidence that we're whole enough to keep caring sustainably.

How might you hold both the weight of what's real AND the lightness of what sustains you?