Learning the Yo-Yo of Emotional Resilience with the Marines

Not too long ago, I spent the afternoon celebrating the Marine Corps with friends. Our friend has been a Marine for the last 20 years. He is retiring. It is bittersweet as the Marines are his tribe and his family’s tribe. Tribes are very hard to walk away from, especially since they know you like no one else knows you because you have been through things that no one else has.

It is always inspiring to be at a Marine celebration because you are reminded of what is important. Because I don’t put my life on the line every day, I take for granted what these guys and gals don’t: that life is a gift, and every day that they get to spend with each other is a significant moment that deserves celebration. Not just a get-together…ho, hum…no biggie...but you can feel the emotion of importance and respect of life and gratitude for the day given.

While I was at the celebration, a dear friend of mine on the other side of the country was putting on a funeral for her mother. Her mother died an unexpected death following what was supposed to be a routine surgery. I was in California, so I was unable to be there with her. I thought about and prayed for her all day. It was not lost on me that she was going through the same striking awareness that life is a gift. She was feeling the emotion and importance of respecting life and death and gratitude for every day given.

When you put your life on the line or are staring at the pain of death, you suddenly have clarity of the importance of family, love and gratitude that most overlook in our day to day routine.

I thought about my own children, my own family, and how I could impart to them in a more realistic way that we need to embrace and hold close how to look at life with the clarity and awareness that both my friends were living this weekend. To be mindful of our resilience and our ability to forgive life even when it punches you in the stomach.

There is one thing in life that we will all experience: pain. Allowing my kids to know that you can travel through pain and come back up again with a deeper appreciation, clarity and gratitude for life is the lesson I want them to learn. Deepening their emotional resiliency skills can help with their ability to rebound after facing these adverse experiences.

Developing emotional resiliency skills is critical when life throws you a punch. The earlier we develop these skills, the better as they protect us from overwhelming experiences. Emotional resilience helps us balance our lives when we get knocked down from adversity and difficulty. Developing these skills help protect us from mental health issues and chronic illness that develops from unhealthy coping.

To gain that clarity, gratitude, reverence and respect for life that my friends were experiencing, we have to love life like a yo-yo.

Yo-yo’s go up and down, much like life. But to live through those downs, we have to let out, let go and forgive, which allows the string to travel back up to a place of love and acceptance. You must let out those parts which do not serve your spirit and the spirit of those whom we must carry with us so that they are still a part of our love here on earth.

Forgiving life is hard. Many people don’t do it well or at all, which creates bigger issues than the circumstance that needs forgiving in the first place. Not allowing yourself to forgive holds you back from living life. Refusing to let the yo-yo string out with forgiveness means not letting the yo-yo come back with the good stuff. You stay all curled up in the hard plastic outer cover with all the hurt and pain sitting in the string.

Try Using a Yo-Yo Without the String

Without a string, it’s just a piece of plastic that sits in the bottom of the toy bin. Whenever it’s dumped on the floor, it’s quickly passed over because it’s considered BROKEN. It doesn’t elicit any joy or fun or smiles. It’s not exciting or fun or silly or meaningful to anyone in any way.

When we let the yo-yo string out to forgive life and let the pain and disappointment or guilt and fear go, the magical end of the string when the forgiveness happens, allows us to pull that life right back up into our hand. We get to let go and forgive and strip the experience of the hurt and pain and pull it back in with the essence of what we can learn and take away from it.

Those Marines have lost friends on the battlefield, time with families, had physical and mental abilities altered due to what they have seen and lived through, but standing in the room that day, I also saw that they had let their yo-yo’s strings out. Everyone in that room had, at some level, forgiven life for the hard and let the string start its a journey back up. The love, gratitude, grace and respect for all of those they lost to let the yo-yo of life makes it’s way back. I will also go on record as saying one of the sweetest sounds in life is a bunch of military families laughing together, having fun and enjoying the yo-yo of life.

I wish that for my friend mourning her mom as well. I wish her the strength and wisdom of a weathered Marine. That, in time, she can let the string of forgiving life for its imperfect unfairness out and, in doing so, bring back the love and appreciation of what it still has to offer.