As a child I was blessed with natural gifts in music, academic studies, and sports. The daughter of two athletes, I discovered I was a fast runner and highly competitive in team sports. When I was 18, I was the youngest player selected in an elite netball squad for under 21’s. I only lasted six months in the squad, often leaving training in tears, feeling like I was being bullied by my coach. In a meeting with the coach, she explained that she was tough on me because she saw the talent that she wanted to bring out in me. For many years my take-away from this experience was that I wanted to be the kind of leader or coach that was supportive and strengths-based. However in recent years, as I’ve reflected on the ways I’ve often tried to avoid struggles in my life, I’ve also been able to look upon this experience in a different light: a missed opportunity to toughen, grow thicker skin, and work hard despite the shouts or judgement from the sideline.

Being a parent is incredibly tough. It is also enriching and enlivening, sometimes feeling like a roller coaster ride of ups and downs. As I try to make sense of this parenting responsibility, piecing together a make-shift compass that is a work in progress, I have thought about how we teach our children to grow resilience. How do we balance a loving, supportive approach with a hands off approach that lets our children explore, fall over, sometimes get hurt, and learn to get back up again? For any parents or educators wanting to dive deeper into this, Maggie Dent has a great podcast worth listening to.

My five year old recently learnt how to ride a bike. It’s easy to think, yes I’ll be the kind of parent that let’s my child explore and learn to fall so that they can learn to get back up again. But when my child was in tears, frustrated at not instantly working it out, it was really tough to just be there beside him without judgement, without hurrying, without impatiently looking at my watch and saying c’mon you’ve only been doing this for five minutes! If we are to make room for growing resilience in our children and loved ones, we also need to show them that it’s ok for them to struggle, to be in tears, to say to them yes this is really tough, have a cry and then when you’re ready give it another go.

Previously I wrote about leaning into the pain but how do we do this? I wrote these little troubles back in 2012 and diving back into the song now it feels like a euphemistic way to make light of some of the heavy load we all carry in our lives. Of course some of our troubles are big – more than just troubles. Last week I was part of a workshop with a group of women, each of whom has lived through a series of layered, traumatic experiences in their lives and it always amazes me how these women find ways to galvanise resistance, resilience, perseverance and humility when they come together to share the load. Painful stories were shared and at times the room felt weighed down by a palpable gloom. Then moments of dancing, singing, laughter and prayer lightened the mood of the room, some of the weight lifting from our collective shoulders. Yes, I believe we need to be able to sit with and lean in to the dark. And I have witnessed that when we are brave enough to do this, there are moments in which fragments of that dark, heavy weight of our troubles lifts away and we are left to dance among rays of light filtering through the otherwise sombre skies.

There are indeed big troubles we carry and try to navigate, but if we get weighed down by them to the point of caving in, then how do we stand up to fight them? At a recent Sunday song circle, we learnt an uplifting song And When I Rise which is based on the words of a poem by Wendell Berry, originally put to song by Seth Martin and arranged by Penny Stone. The lyrics of the song remind us to be gracious of the different seasons of our lives, times of falling, standing, laying, resisting, singing, and rising. Someone felt moved to share the words of another Wendell Berry poem The Peace of Wild Things. For me, this poem beautifully conjures the magic of turning to the wonder of nature, to be reminded of our smallness in this large, magnificent world.

Healing is both outward and inward. We are creatures shaped by our social connections and experiences. Much of our pain is born from our relationships with others and so the healing too must come in the way of repairing these social arteries. This is why group work can be so therapeutic for people - any form of coming together for a common purpose whether that be playing a team sport, joining a book club, or singing in a community choir. Still though, our healing also usually requires some component of personal, individual reflective work. This might take the form of journaling, mindfulness practice, contemplative reading or listening to podcasts, or some other way of intentionally unpacking your experiences and releasing stress. I wanted to find another word for work, but there’s no getting around the toil and labour often required in this intentional endeavour to make sense of life’s unraveling. Every now and then we get lucky in moments of lucid awakening, but even then we usually require some level of intent or desire to come to a deeper understanding of our experiences.

When we close our eyes and travel inward, it can be frightening setting out upon an unknown path, but trying to outrun the pain by avoiding or numbing, also means you miss out on the joy and beauty. It’s okay to fall and be broken. In fact we must fall apart and be broken from time to time. The question is how do you pull yourself back up, somehow, to keep going? Unruly weeds make their way through cracked pavement in concrete cities. Frogs can spend years burrowed underground waiting for big rain to resurface in the Australian desert. We each have our own different way of finding our way back up, at our own pace.

these little troubles

you gave me a present, told me not to look

gave me a present, told me not to look

you said close your eyes

this isn’t a present for your sight

close your eyes

I was afraid I didn’t know how

but these little troubles taught me how to fight

these little troubles taught me how to stand up and fight

so you thought you could

outrun this life

you thought you could

hide in the shadows and just slip on by

no, but these little troubles

don’t you know they could teach you how to fly, up high

oh these little troubles

don’t be fooled, without the dark you can’t see the light

so close your eyes

this isn’t a present for your sight

close your eyes

it’s ok you don’t need to know how