adaptation

Exploring the Edges of Capacity

One potential framing of the situation is to think that my body is falling apart. Or to think that I’m prone to injury. It’s easy to blame age, or look for pathology, or wonder What’s wrong with me? But I really don’t like this way of looking at it. I don’t think it’s useful.

What’s going on? I’m having pain in new areas of my body. Each new experience feels relatively sudden and unprovoked.

But it’s not quite that simple. In truth, I’ve been trying new movements and asking more from tissues unaccustomed to providing. And I’m continuing to push in now-familiar movements, asking even more from tissues that, though accustomed, surely have a limit to their current capacity.

What’s another way of thinking about the situation that will do some good? I’m choosing to frame the experience as exploring the edges of my capacity.

The thing about edges is that it can be unclear where they are. Sometimes you have the idea they are lurking just ahead. Other times they catch you completely unaware. It often takes going past an edge to know where it is, and then, of course, you wish you could back up. But you learned by doing this. You learned where the edge was, what it took to cross it, and what you could do differently to perhaps stay away from the edge. You know your limits now.

This sounds like a way to avoid future injury and all that comes with it, like the pain, frustration, inconvenience, and emotional strain. The idea of staying far away from the edge is appealing. It’s an approach I could take without shame—because who wants to hurt themselves? But it also puts a limit on what I can achieve, and I’m not interested in limiting myself.

What if, by exploring the edges of capacity, we learn to see an edge as simply the thing that currently hinders our ability to make progress toward our goal? What if we treat it as something innocuous and likely temporary? It’s a nuisance, certainly, but not something that defines us. It’s not This is what forty-five looks like or I’ll never be able to do this. It’s just (another) challenge that requires patience and work.

And, at risk of rolling my eyes at this later, I might even call this exposure of weakness an opportunity.

Before encountering the edge, we don’t know where our limitations are. If you’re doing what you want to do and don’t encounter your limits, they may be irrelevant for you. After all, it’s only when they stop us from doing what we want to do that we consider them limiters. But if you’ve discovered a weakness and you haven’t reached your goal yet, you can work on it—to create more capacity, more space between your active self and the edge.

Am I injured? I think so, yes. But I get to choose how I think about it. I’m not falling apart, and I’m not particularly injury prone. What I am is an athlete who wants more from my body. I’m generally working within my capacity while also trying to increase it, and because I’m pushing against the edges on a regular basis I occasionally step too far.

It’s okay. I’m exploring the edges. I know where some of them are now.

These Injurious Times

When the pandemic first made an impact here, in my life, in March 2020, the parallels between pandemic and injury experiences were quickly apparent. Everyday life changed and plans were put on hold. I had to adjust my expectations. I needed to assess risk often, under changing circumstances. I sought to know as much as possible to help me make good decisions. This has been my experience of life during COVID-19 for the last six months, and also my experience of injury.

Early in the pandemic and until very recently, the idea of writing about my injury felt inappropriate and self-absorbed. With so much going on in the world, affecting so many people so profoundly, my personal experience of injury seemed of little importance. It just didn’t feel right to write about it. But lately I’ve been thinking again about what it means to be resilient, this time during a pandemic, and I keep returning to lessons learned during injury. No matter what else is going on, I’m still in my body, still working through an injury, so I think it’s to be expected that my experience of injury will influence how I think about other things.

I’ve written before about working on physical resilience for its own sake as well as for bolstering mindset. Strengthening the body is useful (especially for an apocalypse, or a revolution), and taking action on this front gives the mind something positive to focus on. But mental resilience is surely about much more than giving the mind something to do, and if this pandemic has shown us anything about responding to adversity over an undetermined length of time, it may be that the mindset we carry with us is a significant factor in how we approach and experience hardship, the unknown, and change.

The Resilience Mindset

Resilience, as I’ve come to understand it, is largely about adaptation. To be resilient is to have the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances and thrive. Having a resilience mindset means being ready and willing to adapt as needed in new or challenging environments.

Human society chooses whether to adapt. Unlike other species with limited abilities to move, access food, fend off new predators, or shelter from heat and storm, humans get to decide if, when, and how we adapt (until it’s too late). Whether or not we humans, as a species, survive and thrive is largely up to us. We get to make the decisions that shape our fate.

Of course, we don’t instantly adapt just because we decide to do so. The work of adaptation can be difficult, unclear, and painful. Choosing to undertake this work requires courage and grit.

Applying a resilience mindset to injury or to pandemic times means figuring out how to adapt and doing the work to make it happen. It means setting new goals and adjusting expectations for daily life or long-term outcomes. It may require a new approach to something you learned how to do long ago, which itself requires flexibility and a willingness to try new things. It will likely require redefining what’s important to you, and your definition of success—in work, in relationships, in physical achievement, in life—will probably need to change. These are the adaptations you must choose to undertake in order to thrive, because the world/our body has changed and we cannot live in the past.

Choose to Adapt

The idea of “returning to normal” (that is still making the rounds this far into a worldwide pandemic) doesn’t sound like resilience to me. It sounds instead like determined ignorance: a refusal to acknowledge that the foundation or structure of our society/body has been cracked, deeply, by forces that require attention and redress. Normal is not—was never—an ideal state. Normal might be familiar, but it isn’t necessarily good for us.

Let’s not go back there. Let’s seek transformation and move forward instead.

There’s an idea in resilience planning, particularly in natural hazard and risk management, to “build back better.” This refers to recovery that offers a safer, more resilient place to inhabit following devastation. Though typically applied to buildings and infrastructure, the idea works just as well to conceptualize a just and fair society, or a strong spine. The intention, for whichever challenging situation we are seeking to recover from, is to create a new version that is better able to handle stressors, shocks, and forced change. To be resilient is to be able to withstand, recover, and continue on despite adversity, in whatever new form is optimal for the new condition we find ourselves living in. We do this by adapting.

Adaptation is resilience made manifest.

We each have an experience of injury that is valid and specific to us, and so it is with this pandemic: our experiences are not all the same. But most of us are finding that such challenges expose our weaknesses, and we must decide how to respond. Do we break or do we adapt? Do we settle for old ways of functioning or do we remodel ourselves to thrive?

I’m hoping both experiences lead us to a better future version of ourselves. I think they will, if we choose to adapt.