Breakage

Sometimes getting cancer feels like a failure, even though I truly don't believe that anything in my control - my lifestyle or my environment - caused it. Deep down, perfection has always been my goal, whether it was in my academics, my profession, or my personal life. Getting cancer is so horribly imperfect, such a huge, glaring flaw, the scars from which I will bear for the rest of my days.

But even before my diagnosis I had accepted that perfection was an unattainable standard to hold myself to, and part of coming to terms with my illness has been learning to see the virtue in the flaws. Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms, "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills." I can see now how the goal must not be to remain unbroken but instead to break and heal, break and heal, over and over, and to grow stronger each time. In a building, the welds that hold two pieces of structural steel together are stronger than the steel itself. I've always liked that, that the place that seems like it would be the weakest is actually the strongest. Likewise, our characters may start out as one continuous piece - but with each break, the pieces must be welded together again with the strength of our greater experience, wisdom, and compassion.

For as long as I've known him, Seth has held resiliency as among the most important traits that a society can possess. A resilient people can recover from a terrorist attack, an environmental disaster, a resource shortage, or any other unforeseen, unwelcome event - which is necessary to survival, in his worldview, because an unforeseen event will inevitably happen. Lately we've been talking about personal resiliency. Being resilient doesn't mean that you don't break, he says - it means that you bounce back. We want to show this to our son, that strength is not avoiding the attacks and disasters, but rather learning how to bounce back from them. Perfect is overrated. Failure is how we grow.

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