Calling someone soft is an insult. “Come on man, don’t be so soft” is a common jab used to scare people into action. It’s said to make the other person feel as though they are being weak. And nobody wants that. I get that it’s usually said in a joking, playful manner. But, the phrase itself, and the way it’s received, reveals a great deal about our perception of strength.
I’ve realized that personifying the words strength and resilience unveils this nuance.
For strength, something rock-solid, tough, sturdy and unmoving comes to mind. Maybe an anchor, a mountain, concrete or metal. I think of entrenched demeanor, a stern gaze, gritting of teeth and tensing of muscles.
But when I personify resilience, it is something completely different. Resilience is pliant, flexible, adaptable, it’s bending but not breaking. I think of water, a trampoline, a rubber band, a memory foam pillow, a perennial plant. I think of Gumby, relaxing with sunglasses on, calmly awaiting his next bend.
Strength is one of the traits that is most subject to overconfidence. It’s impossible to test one’s strength until the script has been completely flipped. And I’m not talking about these sham, “get outside your comfort zone” tests that only serve to boost our egos. I’m talking about something that happens not by choice, with no preparation, where you’re flying by the seat of your pants, where there is no playbook or guidelines, it’s just you. That’s when true resilience is tested.
To be resilient is to be strong. Yet we perceive strength to only be this ruggedly firm, inflexible trait. Resilience hides in plain view as we are blind to the other side of strength, softness. This passage from Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn explains this well:
If you hit a mountain or rock with a hammer, in spite of its hardness, or actually because of it, the rock chips, fragments, breaks apart. But if you hit the ocean or a pond with a hammer, all you get is a rusty hammer.
The appearance of stability and rock-solidness is deceptive. We think things or people that don’t crack under pressure are strong. But what’s hidden in that appearance of strength, is the moment-by-moment resilience, it’s the softness. It’s not that the strong don’t crack under pressure, it’s that they recover so quickly, and so naturally, that we don’t even see it.
The strongest things don’t resist change, they absorb it. The lopsided perception that strength equals hardness gives off misinformation. This perception contributes to the idea that we should always appear to have our shit together. It contributes to the shame we feel when we struggle. It is the very foundation of the walls we build around ourselves when we don’t feel our best. We hide when we struggle because we don’t want people to think we aren’t strong.
True strength is often invisible. It’s found in attitude, perspective, and outlook. And where do we develop these inner-qualities of strength? Our bodies’ muscles grow the most when we rest. Well, the same holds true for our attitudes. We grow in our places of absorption, in our times of refresh, in our moments of reflection. It’s exactly this “soft time” or “down time”, which we associate with being weak, that allows us to be strong. The very source of strength is found in the times when we feel “soft”.
We’ve become so carried away with this macho, grin and bear, “don’t talk to me till you’ve overcome” type attitude, that we’ve distorted the reality of actually being strong. Our obsession with the hard physical appearance of strength has led us to become critical of these states of non-doing. It doesn’t look like anything is happening, so we vilify them. But, this non-doing is essentially pulling back the bow, so that when we release, we fire true. I’m not saying that being a couch potato is strong. We have to put in the inner-work and make an effort to grow. It’s these times, where we appear to be doing nothing, that we have the ability to grow the most. It’s these times that we decide who we are and what we’re made of. These times are important because they allow us to reflect, assess and direct our attention to what’s next.
I’ve needed to seriously adjust how much time I allow myself to recover post-diagnosis. It has been, and still is incredibly difficult for me to accept these limitations. The consequences of traveling, late nights, early mornings, extended physical activity and pretty much any form of youthful galavanting are too severe for me now, so I mostly avoid. It’s especially hard when looking through the lens of comparison at my peers. I frequently feel like I’m “wasting days” when I’m recovering. That this isn’t what I should be doing. That it shouldn’t be taking me ten days to recover from a weekend spent at a friend’s house. That I shouldn’t be this fatigued because I didn’t even do that much.
But recently, I’ve started questioning this should voice. And I’ve found that should is the ring-leader of delusion. My belief about what’s best for me still partially lives in a pre-diagnosis world, in my tendencies of a past life. It forgets that things are different now. Going through this internal questioning led me to realize just how much strength there is in figuring out, and executing what’s best for yourself, here, today, under present circumstances. It allowed me to realize the power in trusting and believing in your ability to act in your own best interest. It is especially strong when we are tempted by a past tendency, but decide that’s not for us anymore. That’s growth. That’s resilience. Resilience is born from learning to trust in your ability to cope.
This trust doesn’t just happen though, like any relationship, it needs development, it needs to be worked on. We do this by getting to know ourselves inside and out. It starts with understanding our tendencies. It starts by being brutally honest with ourselves. It starts by asking, what am I feeling? And it starts by being soft and gentle, while we create space within ourselves to feel, and be okay with, exactly how we’re feeling.
If we can develop this space, wonderful things start to happen. This space is where we learn to be patient, warm-hearted, kind and accepting when faced with adversity. It’s where we learn that, when things don’t go as planned, it isn’t the end of the world. It’s where those invisible recoveries take place. This soft, warm space within each one of us is the origin of strength.
It’s tough though, because we’ve been conditioned to think that softness is weakness. We’re so worried about appearing strong to others that we’ve become scared of feeling anything at all. And that’s just it, a lot of us are scared to appear weak, we’re scared to feel. So we continue to chase the strength that we see, unaware of what it takes to actually get there. We harden over our soft spots with continuous action and denial until we lose focus and buy into this strength is only hardness belief.
Rounding out the definition of strength is important, that way, we have more options for response. It’s easy to think the skills that are useful in developing physical strength (will-power, resistance, single-minded focus) are useful in developing mental strength. But they couldn’t be more different. Mental strength requires the cultivation of broad perspective, acceptance, compassion and patience. Physical strength and mental strength are not synonymous.
When I first got diagnosed, my usual methods of recovery and lifting myself up proved ineffective. The will-power based strategies mostly just led to burnout and further frustration. I learned fairly quickly, despite my best efforts, that I could not will my way into feeling better. But the catch here is, that it’s not a one or the other type deal. It’s possible to posses the hard, physical qualities and also the soft, receptive qualities of strength and resilience. There will be times for each, respectively. And as always, it is up to us, individually, to make that discernment.
So the next time someone calls you soft, I hope you’ll take that as a compliment. Because as the sage Lao Tzu put it in the Tao Te Ching:
The soft overcomes the hard; the gentle overcomes the rigid. Everyone knows this is true, but few can put it into practice.