Fall down seven times, stand up eight

The weight in the base

Fall down seven times, stand up eight.

I have this Japanese proverb pinned to the wall in the studio. Not as a motivational poster – I don't do those. I don't tend to respond well to people telling to try harder. Nope, this one is there for orientation.

On the days when something has gone spectacularly badly, it reminds me which way is up. I think I first understood the idea properly through Weebles, although was probably too young to realise that. If you grew up in Britain in the 1980s, you may remember them: little egg-shaped people with silly faces and, crucially, a lot of weight underneath them.

The marketing campaign behind these was incredible, with four words that probably describe resilience better than many modern attempts.

Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down.

Now, you know I have a deep interest in Japan, and behind the proverb that opened this essay, sits a rather old version of the Weebles. The daruma is a small, round, somewhat severe-looking figure weighted at the base. You tip it over and it rights itself. Knock it sideways and it comes back. Push it down and it comes back.

The Japanese word okiagari means something like "rising up." I love that. But what I like about the daruma is that it isn't really trying to rise back up, just like the Weebles. You see, that's the trick. It doesn't grit its teeth or summon its inner strength or chant motivation mantras to get through it. It doesn't listen to a podcast about becoming more resilient with harps and pipes playing in the background. It simply has its weight in the right place – just like the Weebles.

Now, I like this, and it seems to me a much more useful way of thinking about resilience.

We tend to imagine resilience as a form of strength. Be tougher. Develop grit. Bounce back. Don't let them see you sweat. Grind. Hustle. Just do it. But the daruma suggests something different.

Perhaps resilience isn't about being stronger. Perhaps it's about having a low centre of gravity.

You don't come back up because you push harder. You come back up because of what you're weighted with. The people you love, and who love you. The work you care about that has a genuine sense of meaning. The few things you believe are worth protecting. Values that don't change every time a new meme hits social media. A family. Friends. A craft. A place. A philosophy. A set of ideas you can't stop thinking about turning into something valuable. A powerful why.

You know, all the heavy, human, unglamorous things that sit at the bottom and don't move very much when everything above them gets knocked about.

This matters because life is quite good at knocking things about. A project goes wrong, a sale disappears, something you were certain about turns out to be wrong. Someone says no, someone says yes and then changes their mind, someone doesn't respond at all. The thing you thought would take three months takes eighteen. And, sometimes you simply wake up and discover that the version of your life you were working towards no longer seems particularly interesting.

The question isn't whether you'll wobble. You absolutely will. We all do. The question is what happens afterwards. And that, I think, is where the proverb gets more interesting.

The wobble is part of staying upright

We often treat wobbling as evidence that something has gone wrong. But look at a Weeble. I mean, they really are quite good fun still. The wobble is the recovery. The thing moves away from centre and then finds its way back. You could almost say that a perfectly rigid object is less resilient than a slightly wobbly one. It doesn't absorb the impact. It simply transfers it. Bamboo trees are resilient in the same way; they flex, move and bend and rarely break.

There is something similar in people. A low centre of gravity gives you somewhere to move. You can bend without becoming lost or brittle. You can change your mind without changing who you are. You can have a terrible Tuesday without deciding that your entire life is a terrible idea.

This is a much more useful definition of resilience. Not nothing knocks me over. More like: things push me around, but they don't get to decide where I end up.

Don't make the wobble a verdict

There is another trap here. When something goes wrong, we are staggeringly quick to turn an event into an identity. The project failed becomes I failed. The sale didn't happen becomes I'm not good at this. The relationship changed becomes I'm difficult to love and get along with. A bad month becomes this is what my life is now.

The thing itself is usually much smaller than the story we build around it. The fall is an event. The story is what tries to turn it into a verdict about who we are and an identity we can often carry with us for a long time. This is why I write when things go wrong. Not because writing fixes things because it doesn't. But putting the thing on paper forces it to stop being a story I am telling myself and instead becomes a record of an event, and what I can do about it.

What actually happened? What's in my control? What's not? What might I do differently next time? Four pretty dull and boring questions that actually do something very useful; they separate the event from the interpretation. And once you do that, quite a lot of disasters become surprisingly ordinary events, and not an identity.

Maybe

There's an old Taoist story about a farmer whose horse runs away.

"Terrible luck," say his neighbours. "Maybe," says the farmer.

The horse returns with two wild horses. "Wonderful!" "Maybe."

His son tries to break in one of the horses, falls off and breaks his leg. "Terrible!" "Maybe."

Then the army arrives to conscript the young men for war. The son is passed over because of his broken leg. "Wonderful!" "Maybe."

And so on.

Maybe is a remarkably powerful word. It is small, but it carries an enormous amount of weight. Maybe this isn't the end. Maybe it is information. Maybe it changes the route.

Maybe the thing you thought was a disaster will turn out to be useful. Maybe it won't.

We are extraordinarily keen to decide what things mean while they are still happening. A redundancy must mean failure. A rejection must mean we're not good enough. A delay must mean the project is doomed. A mistake must mean we are an idiot – I default here a lot. We like conclusions because conclusions feel like control over what is happening. But most events are not finished when they happen. They are just events and we shouldn't rush to a verdict too soon.

The arithmetic is quite good too

Look again at the proverb.

Fall down seven times, stand up eight. The numbers don't make immediate sense. I mean how can you stand up eight times if you've only fallen seven? Because the eighth standing is where you finish, at least that's what I think. Although to be fair there are entire sub-reddits dedicated to why the numbers are as they are.

I think the proverb is a little joke. You don't need to avoid the falls. You don't need to make each recovery elegant. You don't even need to keep count particularly carefully, you just need to stand one more time than you fall. And standing up is often the very simple and ordinary acts. You open the laptop and send the email. You pick up the phone and make the call. You apologise, you say sorry. You post again, try again, present again, send again. You ask for help, you offer help. You make a better decision next time, you stop doing something, you shift a habit. You go for a walk, or lie down, or have a nap, or hit the gym, or put the smart outfit on.

There's rarely any applause, in fact, you may not need to tell anyone what you're doing. There's no funky sound track or 1980s marketing team when you wobble. And that's the astounding thing really. Resilience rarely looks like resilience while you're doing it. It mostly looks like Tuesday morning.

I think about this with my kids too. I have three boys and they already do, and will continue to, get things wrong. All humans do. What I hope they learn isn't how to avoid failure. That would be impossible, and probably quite boring. It is what happens next. Not perfection. Recovery. Not never falling. Knowing that falling isn't the end of the story.

And at times, in some dark times indeed, I've actually found the resilience in myself purely because I want to show them what it looks like too.

And sometimes someone gives you a hand

There is one important qualification to all this. A daruma can right itself because it is a toy. So is a Weeble. People are more complicated and sometimes you don't bounce back immediately. Sometimes you are properly knocked sideways and sometimes the most resilient thing you can do is let somebody else help you back up.

We have made self-sufficiency a slightly odd virtue – as though needing somebody else is evidence that our centre of gravity wasn't low and strong enough. I think the opposite is often true. People are part of the weight. Friends. Family. Colleagues. The person who knows when you're talking nonsense and will tell you so. The person knows your speaking nonsense, who lets you talk anyway. The person to help you, listen to you, go for a drink with you, send you silly videos and be there, unconditionally too.

A low centre of gravity doesn't mean carrying everything yourself. It means knowing when to ask for help too.

Keep the weight low

So the proverb stays on my wall – not to remind me to be strong, which I often am not, but to remember the daruma, and the Weebles, and the weight in the base, and the fact that upright is where the thing returns to when you leave it alone.

Keep the heavy, real things at the bottom – the people, the work that matters, a clear sense of which way is up – and you don't have to summon the strength to rise. You just stop holding yourself down.

Fall. Stand. Continue. And when you lose count of the falls, don't worry about it. You only ever need to end on the standing.

If you're properly struggling – not a rough week, but properly – that's not something to push through alone; it's exactly the moment to reach for support, and using it is a sign the base is doing its job. In the UK, the NHS has services for precisely this.

Image courtesy of “chépucékoi” by nefasth, CC BY-SA 2.0