It's Up to Us by John Kasich

Author:John Kasich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2019-08-12T18:41:00+00:00

5

Bounce Back

Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.

—Nelson Mandela

Resilience.

It’s the ability to recover from a disappointment or difficulty. The will it takes to keep pressing when all appears lost. The strength to persevere. Some of our setbacks can be devastating, of course, and some are merely dispiriting, but the ways we stand back up when we fall will come to define us over time.

In my own life, I think of that terrible night in August 1987 when my parents were killed in a car accident. I was a young congressman, shuttling between Washington and Columbus, trying to make the world a better place, trying to make my parents proud. Then I got this call with devastating news. It’s everybody’s nightmare, right? It brought me back to the fear I used to have as a child, whenever my father went to pick up my mother from work and I worried they wouldn’t come home—and now, all these years later, that fear came to pass.

I’ve written about this sad chapter before, so I don’t want to dwell on it here except to point out that at the time I didn’t think I would ever recover from the loss, and for a long while there I couldn’t see how I’d ever fight my way back to whole. Happily, with the help of my faith and many enduring friendships, I found myself again, and I continue to find joy and meaning in my life.

Over the next thirty-plus years, most of them in public life, I was made keenly aware of the very many ways we suffer and struggle: addiction, job loss, estrangement from family, poverty, depression, injury, and health issues...there’s no end to the burdens we all share. And yet I’ve come to realize that things are never quite as bad as they first appear, and that even the biggest problems in our lives can be brought down to manageable size with patience, perspective, and resolve.

For every darkness, there is a light—we must simply keep our heads up and our eyes open to see what we can see.

I don’t mean to soft-pedal the very real pain we are sometimes made to endure by suggesting that the pain will simply pass. Time is an essential salve, but it’s not about waiting out the pain until it goes away as much as it is finding a way to rise above it. This goes for our somewhat lesser pains as well—you know, the small defeats that find us on a day-to-day basis, like getting passed over for a promotion, or scrambling to get home to your family after your flight has been canceled. Resilience comes in all shapes and sizes, but be assured, we can be pretty durable. A lot of times, you’ll find out that a disappointment in one area might lead to an unexpected opportunity in another. That promotion that didn’t come your way? It might push you to consider an entirely new line of work, where you were really meant to be all along.

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