Bend, Don’t Break

resilience: element five of Emergent Strategy

After a short break from this series, we’re back with week six of our exploration of Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, a book about how we make sustainable, transformative change.

Here’s an introduction to the series, and here’s element one: fractals, element two: intentional adaptation, element three: interdependence, and element four: nonlinear and iterative.

Soundtrack for this installment:

(Speaking of that song: impossible though it seems, there’s still an effort underway to put Harriet on the $20 bill. Can we at least have this one nice thing??)

Element five of Emergent Strategy is resilience:

resilience: the ability to become strong, healthy or successful again after something bad happens. The ability of something to return to its original shape after it has been pulled, stretched, bent, etc. An ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.

What’s the opposite of resilience? Brittleness… and there’s a lot of it right now. So many of us feel on the edge at the moment. When we’re uncomfortable, anxious, and fearful, but don’t have the capacity to metabolize or exorcise those feelings, we turn rigid. And rigid people break. Rigid structures shatter.

So we attempt to discharge all that anxiety by elevating leaders who vow to fix things for us rather than taking responsibility to be part of the solution ourselves. Or we throw up our hands in defeat, because it’s easier to proclaim things too far gone than do the work of making things better in our own small imperfect ways.

We prioritize our own comfort over everything else, creating impermeable boundaries between right and wrong and us and them. We go thermonuclear on one another, especially online, even people who make honest mistakes in their journey to evolve and learn, in the name of our own immutable “rightness”:

As the attacks grow faster and more vicious, I wonder: is this what we’re here for? To cultivate a fear-based adherence to reductive common values? What can this lead to in an imperfect world full of sloppy, complex humans? Is it possible we will call each other out until there’s no one left besides us? (Emergent Strategy p. 145)

Many of the critiques of “cancel culture” are pretty facile, and I believe a culture of accountability has its place, especially in protecting the vulnerable and mitigating trauma. “Structure creates safety,” as my friend Ashley Goff likes to say, and boundaries are helpful when people are healing from harm.

I also see how cancel culture doesn’t always accomplish what it purports to do; it pushes back with an equal and opposite rigidity, which doesn’t build people’s capacity to grow. As Anna Deaveare Smith wrote in Letters to a Young Artist, “I don’t believe in promising students safety. The world is just too rough for that at the moment. I think we should teach resilience.”

This is really tricky business, and something our family has evolved with a lot. When you’ve got a kid with anxiety, the treatment involves something called distress tolerance. We learn skills to manage discomfort, retraining the brain to see discomfort as a manageable part of life, not an active threat.

But in our case, we now know we’re dealing with some neurodivergence, and in one case, a long-undiagnosed chronic illness. With these conditions on board, resilience is still the goal, but we also need to think in terms of accommodations—providing supports and altering the conditions around the person when possible, because the overwhelm isn’t just a feeling, it’s a reality.

Wherever we start from, though, brown’s wisdom can be helpful in building resilience. She proposes that we:

• Listen with “Why” as a framework.

• Ask: What can I/we learn from this?

• Consider how our real-time actions can contribute to transforming this situation (versus making it worse)? (Emergent Strategy pp. 148-149)

Some further approaches from Holding Change:

• Track fragility and risk in the room. A fragile room can look hardened, cynical, or checked out. Or it can look like intensely over-processing individual needs in ways that don’t build a collective center or focus.

• Practice transformative justice in our closest relationships. Choose patience, communication, mediation, curiosity, boundaries, and uprooting harm over cancellation, public humiliation, ghosting people, or other methods of disposing of people. (Holding Change, pp. 171-172)

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In closing, here’s a parable… one of my favorite stories of resilience:

When Mary Akers sent her last child off to college, she took up an unusual hobby: raising hermit crabs. She fell in love with the quirky creatures, scouring online sources to fill her habitats which grew larger and more elaborate as her passion grew, soon taking up an entire room. She started to discern personalities, discovering which ones had preferences for sparkly shells, or the color green.

Photo by Mohamed Shaffaf on Unsplash

When one of her crabs got pregnant, Akers was determined to give these baby crabs the best possible start. She constructed a series of pools so the mother-to- be could choose the one that suited her perfectly. Once the baby crabs were born, Akers used a turkey baster to filter out the dirty water so it would be as clean as possible. The baby crabs seemed to do well until right before migrating to the land as a full-grown crab, and then they died. This happened again and again, breaking Akers’s heart and leading her to ask, what am I doing wrong? What need am I failing to meet? She built a different tank, tried a new species of seaweed, bought fancier food.

Finally she hit upon the most important ingredient. She remembered in nature, these creatures come to maturity not in a safe and perfectly calibrated habitat, but in a large dispassionate ocean, bumping up against other organisms and forces beyond their control. She had to let go of her role as overprotective mother. “Be the ocean” became her mantra. She started agitating the tank at random times. She gave the baby crabs a high and low tide. Sometimes, the ocean was a calm cradle, other times, a maelstrom.

And then, out of that unpredictable ocean, a mature crab made it from water onto land. And another. And another. The missing element had finally fallen into place: chaos.

Akers says, “I could literally all day every day do nothing but try to get it perfect. But that’s not best for the crabs, that’s definitely not best for me. So it’s a balance of how much do I allow myself to feel responsible. [In my life], my lesson has always been just let go, Mary. Let them be crabs.”

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What I’m Up To

• I’m preaching this Sunday 4/27 at 10:15 at Trinity Presbyterian, Herndon VA in person or via livestream.

• Season two of Andor is out this week, and to celebrate, I’ve got a bonus podcast episode out that explores some of the themes from season one. (If you haven’t seen Andor, it’s an outstanding television show that takes place in the Star Wars universe—but it’s so much more than that. It’s a meditation on power and oppression, it’s an exploration of how people fight back against fascism, it’s an incredibly galvanizing bit of literature for our time.)

• This week’s Art of Onward post for supporting subscribers is open to everyone. (Supporting subscriptions are currently 50% off!)

• Looking way ahead: I’ll be one of the leaders at the NEXT Church National Gathering—always a great time of learning and inspiration for Presbyterian and Presbyterian-adjacent leaders. Hope to see you in Grand Rapids November 11-14!

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Link Love

Long, helpful article about chronic illness, disability, and ableism.

A friend shared this interview with Francis Weller, author of the Wild Edge of Sorrow, about the power of grief. Gosh this was excellent.

Steady on.