On Resilience: A Refusal to Cede the Last Word

Resilience is not a word I pluck from a textbook, nor a slogan for a poster. It is the sound of sirens that cleaves the night at two in the morning and the choice, six hours later, to unlock a classroom door. It is the sight of children walking in. Not with the easy confidence of a world at peace, but with a quiet deliberation that is its own form of courage. They sit down. They open their books. They do the work, even when their sleep was fractured by fear.

This is the air I breathe in Ukraine. Here, resilience is not a theory to be debated but a grammar to be lived. It is the echo of my own mother’s voice across time, a woman who built a life on the bedrock of faith and service, who learned to stand upright. Not by ignoring the winds of history that pressed against her, but by rooting herself in something deeper than circumstance. Her life testified: strength is not bracing for storms, but cultivating a garden stronger than their onslaught.

To choose love when fear is the prevailing logic. To practice gratitude when bitterness offers its easy consolations. To hold fast to a sense of purpose when the horizon is shrouded, this is the work. The word itself, resilience, comes from the Latin resilire: “to leap back.” But what I witness here is something more profound than a recoil. It is not a snapping back to a former shape, but a carrying forward, a bearing of scars that become part of the body, part of the soul, part of the story. It is the refusal to be hollowed out.

Why write this down? Because memory requires a witness. Because pain, left unrecorded, can curdle into a silence that allows it to claim the last word. Writing is my refusal. It is not a denial of the brokenness that surrounds us, but an act of testimony: that even in our profound fragility, there is an unassailable dignity. That the ordinary, repeated acts — teaching a class, sharing a meal, choosing a kind word — are the very things that constitute the extraordinary. Resilience is not abstract. It is flesh and bone, prayer and laughter, wound and healing. It is the quiet, insistent voice of life itself, unwilling to be defined by its suffering.