I have always wanted to be a superhero, to have the super-powers to shift mountains with little effort, to change the world. What about you, have you wanted to be unbreakable or unquestionable. Most kids (in theory all kids) go through this stage in their development when they are all very young, 2 or 3 year usually, where they actually believe that they have limitless power. It seems as babies everything revolves around us and our every wish (which tends to be limited to food, burp, cuddles, clean me) is fulfilled as we demand it. So it seems like we are in charge of the world and we are (hopefully) completely secure in the arms of our parents. But as we gain abilities, it is like there is more and more power to be had. It’s like, wow, I have hands! I can move things! … I can control the world!!! But our limits are untested and everything is new.
As kids we cling to the baby world view that perhaps I am the world, and we begin to test the limits of our power. Usually by testing the limits of our parents. My oldest son is very stubborn, self-determined, and was very good communicator from a young age. When we first had to discipline him, he would literally scream at us, “No, I am the strongest, I am the most powerful, you can’t stop me.” while I am literally holding him back from whatever it is he was not supposed to be doing. In this I saw myself and I think probably all of us. It might not be strength or power that we secretly desire, but it is always a kind of unbreakableness, a perfection, or an influence.
We all dream of being Gods, or Goddesses, it might be the expression of perfect power or perfect beauty or perfect knowledge etcetera. In the Christian tradition this is the root of the first sin, the desire to be like God in his complete knowledge and invulnerable power. However, in reaching out for power, and eating the “apple,” the first thing that humans discover is our own vulnerability. As a result of eating the fruit of knowledge, Adam hides from God because he now knows himself to be “naked”. I believe, (like Jordan Peterson if you know him) this nakedness is not talking about actually having no clothes, but is a metaphor for the human condition…we are weak in many ways and in this world we have to recognise our weaknesses. Even if you are not a spiritual person I think you might agree with this. Whether you are a missionary who sees themselves as under the protection of God, a teenage adrenaline junky who feels undefeatable, a professional hitting your goals and climbing the ladder of power, or you have the perfect family…we all know at any moment with the smallest shift in the wind of fate, we could find ourselves poor, broken, lonely or dead.
Seeking invulnerability is a fool’s errand. We will never be unbreakable. But, there is no reason to just be fragile either. The alternative is to be unfragile. A fragile thing falls apart easily when hit, it breaks under pressure. The opposite of breaking under pressure is not staying the same, but it is becoming more in response to the pressure. The unfragile is not robust or invulnerable as these things don’t respond at all to a hit. Unfragile is, “what does not kill us makes us stronger,” or more flexible, or more beautiful, or more capable, or more human, or more loving, or more joyful…just more better.
to What are you seeking?… beauty, power, love, or knoweldge?
One way of understanding our personalities is to identify the desire/s that drives our unconcious behaviours. These drives might be to, have control, be included, be right, be worthy, have success, be unique, be capable, have security, or be unrestricted. Each of these are all about feeling a different aspect of love or acceptable in ourselves. As unhealthy people we seek theses things through reaching for material or temporary virtues, like beauty or wealth, or human power, like status or honour. These things fade and eventually fail us.
When you are feeling disempowered, depressed, anxious, or hopeless ask yourself ….
- What do I feel like I lack?
- What am I chasing after? Or what am I trying to prove I have?
- What story am I telling myself about this thing I think I lack
Mediate on what is the deeper truth behind your negative self-image
For example if you feel incapable, no-body is truely incapable, just limited, who told you this and why? Focus on the capabilities you have been given.
The older we get the more most of us realised pain, weakness, failure and brokenness is as much the stuff of life as all the things we want, like joy, wholeness, wonder, friendship, intimacy, and love. For some the pain becomes the dominant experience and we end up truly broken, angry, resentful, depressed and maybe selfish. This is my definition of fragility of the human person. When the world hits you, you break, like glass, and live out your life as a less than you were and much less than you could be. But not only that in our fragility, instead of picking up the pieces many of us dwell in our brokenness, hate and anger and malice and pride. This fragility creates the opportunity for each broken piece to be broken again and again. We create a downward spiral. For example, we resent our loneliness so much we become the type of person others don’t like, and then hate ourselves the more relying on tubs of ice cream to fill our emptiness. Or to hide shame we come to believe we are deserving and beat our way to the top only to find we have become an worthless selfish shell of a person who has no purpose when wealth, beauty or youth evaporates.
Unfragility[1] is the opposite of this spiral, when we are hit, hurt, crushed, betrayed we are reformed in a way that is better than before the hit. The unfragile transformation is not a transformation into shards and eventually to dust, like a fragile person, but a transformation away from destruction and into fulfillment of life, strength and contentment.
Our task at Unfragile.life is to help you, overcome the challenges of life that will arise or are in your life right now. Not to patch you up, but to give you the tools to respond to the stings and arrows and nuclear missiles of life (metaphorically speaking, but being unfragile is a good thing in nuclear houlocaust too, if you don’t get incinerated). That might sound a bit depressing, but unfragility is about the very opposite, having joy and fun and friends and community are big parts of building unfragility, both in preparation for and during the hits.
Unfragile.life is not just about you. Sorry…life is not just about you either. It is also about you and your community. The fragility in you is also in our world. And many of us are out there trying to fix it or patch it up in our work places, and communities. How can we build unfragility into society, are there patterns in culture, human behaviour, governance and business that can help the worlds brokenness spiral upwards. Just to get it straight we are not talking about utopian philosophy here. We are talking about getting down and dirty, living in the mess and going beyond the mess. We are not promising to prevent of fix your life, your work place or your town. We are not promising to prevent misfortune or failure. But we are promising to prepare your for it and be there as a resource when things fall apart or your winter finally arrives.
You have at least one purpose to your life and your job, mission, or duty is almost always about changing the world for the better (if it is not get out now!). What is the good if we are not making a better world in the process of growing in ourselves? At Unfragile.life we ask how do we help grow an irrepressible you, and how do you contribute to growing dynamic communities to also become more unfragile, to make us all more beautiful and sustainable and bounceable, in the face of trials that will come.
[1] The idea was coined as “anti-fragile” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book of that name. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012)
