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RESILIENCE

Kathryn Atkins
3 min readNov 19, 2024
Beautiful white flower with bright yellow center and ice on every petal.
Photo by Brigitte Elsner on Unsplash

Resilience noun

Noun: resiliency; plural noun: resiliencies

  1. The capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
  2. The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.

NOTE: The photo above belies the gravity of the word. Or does it? Somehow, this flower has withstood the ice and bears a toughness that perfectly matches the definition. So the image stays.

Resilience in a Nation

As I think about resilience, I wonder if the rest of the world might think the U.S. has it easy. We don’t need resilience. We don’t need the toughness to recover from difficulties. We are free. We are a nation of excellent resources in both the natural and the human sense. We are “resourceful”…the nuance and double entendre of that word applies.

We do have it “easy” in some respects. We are very lucky to have the U.S. Constitution to bring us back from the brink of human weaknesses of all kinds and just plain unfortunate world events. But we came by our resilience the hard way, by revolution. And by sheer coincidence, our founding fathers “happened” to be here, on this continent, at the same time when we were forming. How did that happen?

Our nation has suffered much from wars and terrible decisions. There were many. It’s okay…

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Kathryn Atkins
Kathryn Atkins

Written by Kathryn Atkins

Author, poet, business writer, pianist, flamenco dancer, altMBA grad, Berkeley MBA. I like yoga, reading, traveling, family, friends, and dogs.

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