Last month, Collins Dictionary unveiled its word of the year: “lockdown”, defined as “the imposition of stringent restrictions on travel, social interaction and access to public spaces”. As Collins explained: “We have chosen lockdown as our word of the year as it encapsulates the shared experience of billions of people who have had to restrict their daily lives in order to contain the virus”. Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster went with “pandemic”, with runners-up “quarantine” and “asymptomatic”. And the Oxford English Dictionary, instead of choosing a single word, issued a 38-page report, analysing the use of dozens of words, including “coronavirus”, “doomscrolling”, “social distancing” and “systemic racism”. “Given the phenomenal breadth of language change and development during 2020,” the report explains, “Oxford Languages concluded that this is a year that cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word”.

I disagree. There is a single word that sums up 2020 and does encapsulate, in a deeper sense, the shared experience of billions of people this year. That word is “resilience”. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity”. It is that quality which allows us to overcome challenges, hardship, obstacles and adversity, instead of being defeated by them. The reason “resilience” is my word of the year is because unlike quarantine, coronavirus and social distancing, resilience is the only one that is going to be just as relevant when the pandemic is over. Resilience is the quality that was summoned in us by all the challenges of 2020. It will also be the quality that will carry us forward into 2021.

Resilience is often spoken about in terms of navigating or simply getting through challenges. But the key part of resilience is not about bouncing back, it’s about bouncing forward. It is about using adversity as a catalyst to get better and become stronger.

Of course, we have always needed resilience. But what we have learnt in 2020, both individually as students or teachers and collectively as a school, is that at a time of so many losses and such deep uncertainty and anxiety, we simply cannot do without it. The glimpse of vaccination offers the hope that this pandemic will end. But our challenges will not end when this pandemic does. Resilience is the vaccine we already have – it’s our immune system for the inevitable ups and downs of life. Just as with our body’s immune system, the hostile agents are always there and always coming at us. Resilience allows us to tap into deeper resources in ourselves we did not even know we had, not just to overcome the obstacles, but to be transformed by them.

The power to build resilience is within us: just as we can learn other skills in the classroom through practice, we can teach ourselves and our students to be more resilient. We can make ourselves more or less vulnerable by how we think about things. Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic.

Though the science unpacking the psychological and neural mechanisms of resilience may be recent, in many ways, it is confirming a concept that has been at the heart of spiritual and philosophical traditions for millenia. In the Bible, we are told that “God gave us a spirit not of fear, but of power and love.” Lao Tzu, the 6th century BC founder of Taoism, taught us that “if you correct your mind the rest of your life will fall into place,” and that “knowing others is knowledge, knowing yourself is wisdom,” while in the Bhagavad Gita, we are reminded that “happiness arises from the serenity of one’s own mind”.

Stoic philosophers understood this well. As they have taught us, while we cannot control what happens in the external world, we do have control over our inner world and how we respond. For Epictetus, this meant that “men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.” In other words, do we see crises solely in terms of the havoc they have wrought, or also as opportunities to get stronger and grow?

Science has confirmed everyday ways to nurture our resilience through sleep, taking time to unplug and recharge, gratitude, socal connection and the belief in something larger than ourselves. In our school this year, faith has provided us with emotional support, a way of making sense of our lives and helping us to be a part of a chain, as we ourselves give back to others who have given to us. We have drawn strength and supported the community in many ways and helped our students learn, I hope, that showing up for other people is beneficial and does not have to cost anything; indeed, such an act ends up being beneficial to the giver.

This has been a tragic year for so many – a year of so many losses and so much grief. And yet, what the science and wisdom of resilience show us is that, as horrible as this year has been, the long-term impact on both our individual and our collective lives as a society is not predetermined or fixed. This has been a year in which we have learned what we need and what we don’t need, what adds value to our lives and makes us stronger, and what depletes us. By tapping into those parts of our lives that many of us were ignoring or not tending to before this year, we can nurture our resilience and create a new normal for 2021 – one that is not simply going back to the pre-pandemic status quo, but one that is a better normal. It is our resilience that offers us a chance at true transformation, allowing us to go deeper, connect with what we truly value, grow and expand.

It is a common refrain on social media to want to say goodbye to 2020. But our goal should be more than to just get through 2020, which will pass no matter what we do. The new year will inevitably come, but what kind of year will it be? What lessons will we carry with us to shape it into a year of hope and possibility? How will we have been transformed based on what we have experienced? That is up to us. And the more we summon and strengthen our resilience, the more we can bounce forward into a new and better year.

Nisha Kaura
Head of Junior School