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Sitting at Rosie\u2019s kitchen table, drinking tea, she opened up her heart to me in a very real, and somewhat raw, conversation for my podcast<\/a>. I wasn\u2019t sure where our conversation would go and simply let it unfold. We talked about many things \u2013 from the personal nature of grief and self-forgiveness to navigating friendships when life presses in and the levers to ending family violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the many valuable gems of hardwon wisdom Rosie shared was about self-trust and not underestimating our innate resilience. When we hear of the trials and tragedies others face, a common reaction is to think \u201cOh, I could never deal with that if it happened to me.\u201d Rosie would have said the same thing. Yet in the midst of the most traumatic hours and moments of her life, she found within herself a deep well of resilience and resolve beyond what she herself had ever assumed she had. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, none of us wish to have our courage tested, not even in small ways much less as Rosie did. Yet over the course of our lives, we will all be forced to confront situations we could never have predicted, much less have prepared for. Just as I always look for the learning in my own hardships, Rosie\u2019s experience of refinding the ground beneath her after a profound loss holds a lesson for us all. That is, to reflect upon where we may be selling ourselves short and playing ourselves small because we\u2019ve spun ourselves a story that we are not as brave or resilient as those \u2018other people\u2019 whom we decide are made of more mettle than ourselves. People like Rosie Batty. People like burns survivor, Turia Pitt, who has said that just because most of us have never been tested to the extreme doesn\u2019t mean we don\u2019t have within us the strength we admire in others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you listen to our conversation<\/a> (and I hope you will), you will hear Rosie say how \u201cWe can never underestimate the resilience of the human spirit. Most of us are far stronger than we realize.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed we are. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet Nietchke\u2019s well-worn maxim that \u2018what doesn\u2019t kill you makes\nyou stronger\u2019 is not true. It never was. Some people come out the other side of\nadversity with a closed mind, an angry heart, their minds shut off from all\nthat might otherwise heal them. Others never come out the other side at all,\ndefined by their adversity, a victim of self-pity, their future held hostage to\nthe past. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Finding joy can be hard when your heart is as raw in sorrow as Rosie\u2019s. Yet she has refused to give up on laughter (particularly at herself) and, as she shared in her book A Mothers Story<\/a>, staying positive toward all the goodness life holds is a daily undertaking. \u201cIt would be easy to let this experience turn me into a bitter person,\u201d she reflected, \u201cbut I want to use it to become a better one.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The same is true for all of us. No matter how hard we may try to avoid the ravages on our hearts, we never can. Not if we also want to live truly joyful lives. As I shared in this previous post<\/a> about my brother Peter\u2019s death, to cut ourselves off from sadness is to also cut ourselves off from joy. The only thing we can ever really do is to open our arms wide to the full catastrophe of the human experience, and to trust that no matter how dark our days can be, how heavy our burdens can weigh, or how deep our wounds can cut, that we have it within us to rise up and once again know joy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Only then can we regain our spiritual footing and forge a new path\nforward, not one that denies our sorrows or struggles, but one that draws on\nthem to infuse a deeper dimension into our living; one that expands \u2013 not\nshrinks \u2013 our capacity for loving and laughing and, when the need arises, for\nletting go the future we had planned on living and for embracing the one we\nhave. <\/p>\n\n\n\n