Shit Happens

The French have a phrase when things go wrong, ‘C’est la vie’. Either you’ve heard it said or you’ve said it yourself. Translated, it means ‘This is Life’, the phrase has philosophical wisdom because it acknowledges that in life, things can go wrong.

In life shit happens, and to top it all, Murphy’s Law tells us that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong at precisely the worst possible moment. Your car breaks down the morning of the interview. The relationship ends right when you thought you’d finally found someone. The health problem emerges exactly when you are about to make your move. Life doesn’t consult your diary.

I’ve sat with patients at their lowest points more times than I can count, from teenagers facing their first serious failure to people in their nineties navigating loss, illness, and the erosion of everything that felt certain when they were younger. And I can tell you this with absolute conviction. Everyone gets knocked down at some time.

The difference between the people who recover and the people who don’t isn’t always luck, it isn’t genetics, it isn’t always the severity of what happened. It’s something far more interesting than any of those things.

Bouncing Back

Let me borrow a definition from physics. In materials science, resilience is the ability of an object to return to its original shape after deformation. A diving board bends under your weight and returns to its original position. A wine glass meets the floor and doesn’t. The question isn’t whether life is going to bend you. It is. The question is whether you’re a diving board or a wine glass, whether you’re going to rebound or shatter.

But the physics definition only gets us so far. In my practice, resilience looks like something far more unglamorous than any textbook captures. I see patients who are genuinely, seriously unwell, and the balance between good and bad outcomes comes down to small decisions.

A patient managing a few more mouthfuls of food could maintain their strength to fight off infection, another forcing themselves to cough despite the agony of it could be clearing their lungs just enough to avoid pneumonia, whilst getting out of bed and moving about when everything in them screams to stay there could prevent the blood clot that would have killed them.

These aren’t dramatic Hollywood moments. They’re small, painful, unglamorous decisions, but they’re the decisions that separate outcomes.

Resilience isn’t always a grand gesture; sometimes it’s just doing the next small necessary thing when you’d rather not do anything at all.

Stiff Upper Lip

There’s an old British concept called the stiff upper lip. Self-control in adversity. Composure under pressure. It’s somewhat out of fashion now, born from too many wars and too much rationing and too little therapy, but there’s something in it worth salvaging. External resolve matters. It matters to the people around you, who draw confidence from your composure when they’re frightened. And it matters to you, acting steadily can help you become steady. Studies show that simply behaving confidently can reduce anxiety and improve performance.

But external composure only works if you’re also dealing with what’s happening internally. You cannot maintain an external façade indefinitely if you’re falling apart internally. The stiff upper lip is a first step, not a complete strategy. If you want genuine resilience, you need more than a brave face.

The Victorian poet W.E. Henley captured the same defiant spirit in Invictus — written while he was recovering from tuberculosis of the bone — declaring himself ‘the master of my fate’ and ‘the captain of my soul,’ not because his circumstances were good, but because he refused to let them define him.

If you haven’t read Man’s Search for Meaning, stop what you’re doing and order it from Amazon. Frankl chronicled his experiences in the concentration camps in the Second World War. He noticed something that changed how we understand human endurance. The people who survived conditions that should have broken anyone had one thing in common. They had a purpose that extended beyond their immediate circumstances. Something they were living for that the circumstances couldn’t reach.

Purpose gave them a source of inner strength that external conditions couldn’t extinguish. Frankl drew on Nietzsche to name it. He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how. With a real purpose, you can endure almost anything. Without it, even moderate setbacks can feel insurmountable because you have no larger context in which to make sense of the suffering.

JFK understood this too. Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction. You can be brave and hardworking and still fold the moment things get difficult if you don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing. Purpose is what keeps you moving when the external motivations have faded.

The most resilient people I know do two things simultaneously that most people find impossible to combine. They confront reality without softening it, and they maintain faith that they’ll get through it. Jim Collins described this in Good to Great as the Stockdale Paradox, named after Admiral Jim Stockdale, a US prisoner of war in Vietnam for 8 years. When Collins asked him who didn’t make it out of the camps, his answer was striking. The optimists. The ones who convinced themselves they’d be out by Christmas, and then Christmas came and went. Then Easter. Then Thanksgiving. They died of broken hearts.

Stockdale himself never doubted he would prevail in the end. But he refused to set false deadlines or comfort himself with lies about the timeline. Face the brutal reality. Maintain absolute faith. Don’t confuse the two by using one to avoid the other.

I see this play out regularly. People who refuse to acknowledge the real nature of their situation make themselves false promises, over and over, until they make one too many and give up entirely. The truly resilient don’t do this. They look at what’s actually happening, acknowledge how hard it is without flinching from it, and keep going anyway. They don’t need softeners. They need clarity and faith held together.

Here’s something I’ve noticed across two decades of watching people navigate serious adversity. The ones who recover fastest aren’t necessarily the ones who suffered least. They’re the ones who refused to accept that the suffering was permanent. They allowed themselves to feel the full weight of what happened, because pretending it didn’t matter never works for long, but they also refused to let the weight become a story about who they were. What happened to you is not what you are. That distinction, held firmly, is among the most protective aspects of human psychology.

Keep Going

Resilient people are also proactive. They don’t wait for rescue. There’s an old saying that captures it perfectly: if you’re going through hell, keep going. Not keep hoping. Not keep waiting for conditions to improve. Keep going. Don’t stop in the middle of hell and set up camp. The first habit in Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits is simply to be proactive. In plain English, do something about it. Every day. Even a small something. Movement beats stagnation.

Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset matters here too (Dweck, 2006). People who see failure as information recover from setbacks significantly faster than people who see failure as identity. With a growth mindset, other people’s success inspires rather than threatens. Criticism becomes data rather than attack. Adversity becomes the curriculum rather than the verdict.

There’s a Zen teaching that’s been around for two thousand years. Fall down seven times, get up eight. That’s resilience at its most basic. But let’s take it further. Don’t just stubbornly get back up. Learn from what knocked you down. Have a purpose that drives you forward even after you’re up. Have a plan that incorporates what you’ve learned. Getting back up is the minimum requirement. What you do with the experience is what determines whether it cost you something or gave you something.

I’ve watched people emerge from the same catastrophic circumstances in radically different states. Two patients, same diagnosis, same prognosis, same treatment pathway. One was back to work and functionally well within a year. The other was still being consumed by anguish three years later. The difference wasn’t physiological. It was in how each of them had chosen to frame what happened to them. One saw it as something that had happened in her life. The other saw it as something that had happened to her identity. The event was identical. The relationship to the event was everything.

You can’t control what happens to you. You cannot prevent all the shit that’s coming. What you can develop is a relationship with adversity that doesn’t leave you destroyed by it. That means doing the internal work, building purpose that’s bigger than your current circumstances, maintaining the Stockdale balance of brutal honesty and unshakeable faith, and keeping yourself in motion even when motion feels pointless. The people who navigate adversity best aren’t superhuman. They’ve just built a better psychological infrastructure for the inevitable storms.

Three Things You Can Do This Week

1. Name your purpose. Write down in one or two sentences what you are ultimately working towards — something bigger than your current circumstances. Keep it somewhere visible. When adversity hits, your purpose is what stops the situation from becoming your identity.

2. Practise the Stockdale balance. Pick one current challenge and write two things: the honest, unvarnished reality of how hard it is, and one reason you have genuine faith you’ll get through it. Hold both at the same time. Don’t use one to escape the other.

3. Do the next small thing. Identify one concrete action — however small — that moves you forward on something you’ve been stuck on. Don’t wait for motivation or better conditions. It’s often said that if you’re going through hell, keep going. Do the thing today.

Life is going to knock you down. It always has. It always will. Shit happens. The only question is what you do next.

Further reading

1. Collins, J. (2001). Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t. HarperBusiness.
2. Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.
3. Frankl, V. E. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.
4. Henley, W. E. (1875). Invictus.
5. Nietzsche, F. (1889). Twilight of the Idols.