Factors of Resilience
8 Principles to help you navigate uncertainty, chaos, and disorder.
I recently heard someone say that that inherent unpredictability and uncertainty of life can feel like “looking both ways before crossing the street, and then getting hit by an airplane.”
For better or worse, we often live under the illusion that things are stable when in fact they are always changing.
We crave a straight line of increasing progress, happiness, and growth; but in reality, life is cyclical. We are always surfing the tension between stability and chaos. A few ways to represent it:
- Order → Disorder → Reorder
- Orientation → Disorientation → Reorientation
- Integration → Disintegration → Reintegration
The hard part is navigating the middle phases.
The prefix “dis,” which all the middle phases share, means asunder, apart, or into pieces. How, then, can we maintain some semblance of stability through change and challenge, through the middle phases?
The principles below — all of which are supported by modern science, ancient wisdom, and daily practice — can help.
