I tend to associate my lessons on risk-taking with my father—though my mother certainly modeled the behavior too. Growing up, I remember loving to hear stories of my father’s youth: of skeeching behind cars (grabbing their bumpers and being towed through icy streets) during snowy Rome, New York winters; of his snow shoveling business in which he charged flat fees to keep driveways clean all winter instead of getting paid per cleaning; of his work as a stable hand working with, and learning to love horses, and resting in manure piles to keep warm in the winter. Stories of riding a homemade go-kart down a hill, discovering that the brakes were inadequate, and grinding knuckles to the bone trying to stop; of the bicycle he ruined (according to his grandfather, a notable inventor himself)) to turn it into a motorbike, which he rode from upstate New York to Cleveland Ohio; of his work on steam trains, shoveling coal and traveling the country; of his showing up at my mother’s door in LaGrange, Illinois before they were really dating covered in soot after a working train trip from Cleveland, only to find she already had a date with her hometown boyfriend. Clearly his youth was filled with adventure and risk-taking. Listening to these stories, we were often incited and encouraged to take up our own adventures, building our own motorized go-kart with many notable adventures of our own. We started our own snow shoveling business, and with it we took on and learned to manage our first major debt.
One thing that often surprised me was my parents’
willingness to let us take on risk on their behalf: putting us in charge of
important building projects and letting us learn by our own mistakes; letting
me fix the hoses on the family car all by myself (before I could You-Tube it!!),
and, amazingly, letting us use important family resources in ways that exposed
them to loss.
Resilience is something I only began to think about as I was
trying to foster it in my own children. I tend to associate lessons on
resilience with my mother, though again, both Mom and Dad clearly exhibited and
fostered this trait. I clearly remember an early perplexing discovery in
interpersonal relations: that I could be in big trouble for fighting with
siblings, not doing my chores, going someplace without telling my parents, or
literally pulling the rug out from under my mother (with the lights out as part
of our haunted house!!)—and somehow everything was okay and back to normal just
a few minutes later.
I remember being told that trusting God meant knowing I
would be forgiven and having confidence that things would turn out okay in the
end. I remember being comforted but confused when my mother sent me off to
school with the kiss and an “I love you” after I had just been found and
punished for pushing clay through the window screen to see how it would
extrude. I remember friends at school telling me that they’d be in trouble for
a day or two for something they’d done and me thinking my parents were strange
the way they bounced back so quickly after administering the punishment for a
misdeed. This unusual behavior gave me the confidence to try things out—to take
risks—knowing that if things went wrong, there would be consequences, but that
I would recover. This confidence, which gradually spread from my dealings with
my parents to those with others, became my source of optimism, which is at the
heart of resilience. This now ingrained resilience has been critical every day
of my life.
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