Can Resilience Lead to Gratitude

Wondering whether Resilience Can Lead to Gratitude is considering one path to success and what it means at the end. What is the point of resilience?

In the documentary, The Dawn Wall, about Tommy Caldwell the famous climber and first to climb the Dawn Wall in Yosemite on El Capitan, his family talks about how slow he was as a child. He didn’t crawl until after he was two. His father began taking him on daring adventures to build up his resilience he said. In the end, his son climbed a wall considered impossible that no one else had ever climbed.

Motivation and Resilience

The motivation for the climb was to escape the grief of a failed marriage. Caldwell needed to get his head into something that would be totally absorbing. At the top, with hands raised, he completed seven years of efforts to map out the wall and fail many times at traversing the steps.

What do the raised hands mean? What are the feelings being experienced? What does it feel like to accomplish the hardest thing in the world? Certainly happiness. Pride. Relief. Gratitude for the rewards of so much work. Not wall efforts result in a good payoff. Is their gratitude when efforts fail?

Eric Greitens, Rhodes Scholar and Navy Seal wrote a book called Resilience. It is about his time going through Seal training. The Army has a similar training that is considered harder. Greitens describes how the training is focused on breaking the participants. Only the most committed and as he says, resilient, can make it. What do they feel at the end of training? Thank God its over, for sure. He says its the best experience you never want to repeat.

Why Resilience to Accomplish Difficulty?

Why is resilience needed to accomplish the most difficult feats on earth? In a Mission Impossible episode, Tom Cruise is telling his handler, Anthony Hopkins, that the assignment would be more than difficult. Hopkins says of course, that’s why we don’t call it Mission Difficult.

Is resilience the key ingredient of accomplishing the impossible? If missions are impossible, why don’t more people achieve them? They are too difficult and people cannot figure out how to crack the code and cannot take the continuous defeat experienced in the process. Most people don’t have the personal perseverance to do impossible and maybe difficult things.

What imbues a person with resilience? In Caldwell’s case it was a flight from pain. Tom Brady seems to have been driven as a result of what he felt was rejection in his early years. He was 6th string at Michigan and drafted by the pros in the 7th round. He wanted to prove a lot of people were wrong in not seeing his talent. What they really underestimated was his drive.

What Drives Us?

Daniel Pink in Drive, says most people have the desire to do something worthwhile, find their independence, and make a contribution bigger than themselves. We don’t compare the fact this drive is the same as the action of Nature’s smallest particles. Atoms are designed to contribute to the bigger picture to make everything better. Its a cosmic thing.

Are humans the only creatures to feel gratitude? The lowest level creatures have lizard brains and are not capable of feelings. As we move up the scale and the additional brains are evolved, creatures like mammals are capable of more complex emotions. They also have natural drives in their DNA to protect their families and contribute to the larger picture of community.

With so much to accomplish in our lives, it is only natural that we might take stock at the end of the day and count our blessings. Is the basis of religion the fact that if we behave in a certain manner we will be blessed with rewards? If we love our deity, will he in return bless us with abundance? Do we have days of thanks for having been blessed?

Is not a major point of life in arriving at a time where we feel we have been blessed after all that has transpired. Grandparents look at grandchildren and feel blessed. Retirees may look at their accumulated savings and feel blessed. Seniors reach their retirement years in good health and feel blessed. Business founders find success after years of struggle and feel blessed.

Being blessed is feeling gratitude. It often takes a big struggle to get to the point of being blessed. The ability to get through the struggle is usually resilience. Yes resilience does lead to gratitude.

Lifestyle Posts:

Lifestyle Determines Our Health

How Lifestyle Leads to Happiness

Lifestyle Changes for Productivity

Making Gratitude a Primary Goal

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