Becoming Wind-Firm
On grit, resilience, and growing stronger through what stands in our way
The knock
How do I bounce back from this?
Sooner or later, something knocks us. A loss we did not see coming, a redundancy, a relationship that ends, or simply a season in which everything at once seems to push against us. And when it does, most of us reach for a word we have been handed all our lives: resilience. Be resilient. Bounce back.
I’ve come to think that word is often misunderstood, and the misunderstanding does real harm. We tend to picture resilience as a kind of hardness: the person who feels nothing, needs no one, and springs back to exactly the shape they were before, as though the knock never happened. When we fail to manage that, and most of us do, we conclude that we simply are not resilient people.
Nature tells a different and far kinder story.
What the wind teaches
A tree raised in full shelter tends to grow tall and slender. A tree that is regularly moved by the wind does something remarkable: it lays down more wood in answer to it. Its trunk thickens, its roots spread deeper, its branches strengthen where they join. Those who study trees call this becoming wind-firm, and the knocks are part of how it happens. The tree doesn’t grow strong despite the weather. It grows strong in conversation with it.
It’s also why a young tree staked too tightly, or for too long, often fares worse once the stakes come off. Kept too still, it was never given the chance to grow its own strength. There’s something in that for all of us, and perhaps especially for those of us who are parents: the protection that keeps every wind away can quietly withhold the very thing that makes a sturdy core.
Wind-firm is not the same as rigid. A wind-firm tree still bends. It moves, sometimes dramatically, and then it rights itself, because what holds it is not stiffness but its strengthened core and roots. That, I think, is a far truer picture of resilience than the hardened one we were sold.
What follows the storm
I want to air this with caution, because this is easily misheard. None of this is a case for celebrating pain, or for dismissing a wound as though it were secretly good for us. Some winds should never have blown, and no one should be told their hurt was a gift. A storm does not make a tree strong; a storm can just as easily split it.
What matters is what follows. For us, the new wood is laid down not by the knock itself but by what we do with it afterwards: coming to understand what happened, working through what it taught us about ourselves and about the world around us, and letting that understanding settle slowly into our grain.
That is how we become wind-firm. Not by being hurt, but by being heard about the hurt, by the people who care for us and, not least, by ourselves.
Ordinary magic
This is also where the research points. Ann Masten, who has spent decades studying how children and families come through adversity, reached a conclusion that reshaped her field. Resilience, she found, is not the property of a rare few who are somehow invulnerable. It is common, what she called ordinary magic, arising from ordinary human systems, and above all from our connections with caring, capable people. Neither is it a fixed trait. It shifts as the conditions of a life shift.
I find this one of the most hopeful ideas in the realm of psychology. It means resilience is not something we either have or lack, handed out at birth. It’s something that grows, and it grows best in relationship. Roots, in other words, are rarely grown alone.
What stands in the way
There is an older strand of thought that speaks to the other half of this: not what happens to us, but how we meet it. Nearly two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius wrote in his private notebooks a line that has outlived his empire: "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."
Ryan Holiday took that line as the heart of his book - The Obstacle Is the Way, drawing from the Stoics three disciplines for meeting difficulty: perception, action and will. Each of them, I find, maps closely onto the work of therapy.
Perception is the discipline of seeing what has actually happened, as distinct from what we have made it mean. A rejection happens; the conclusion ‘I am unlovable’ is something we added. A setback at work happens; ‘I am a failure’ is an interpretation laid over it, often in a voice we absorbed long ago. Separating the event from the story is not pretending the event was fine. It’s refusing to let the story do more damage than the event.
Action is the discipline of the next right step rather than the heroic leap. Obstacles are rarely dismantled in one go. They are worked at, patiently, from whatever small foothold is available.
And will is the discipline of accepting what genuinely cannot be changed, so that our energy goes where it can do some good. There’s a deep relief in it. Not every wind is ours to stop. Our task is the roots. Which quietly turns the opening question inside out. The thing to ask ourselves may not be "how do I get back to who I was before this?" - that person didn’t yet have these roots, but: “Who is this knock asking me to become, and am I willing to meet them?”
I would add one therapeutic caution to the Stoics. Turning an obstacle into a way forward is not the same as skipping the feeling it brings. A perception that leaps straight to ‘every setback is an opportunity’ can become another way of not grieving. The way through usually runs through the feeling first.
Grit, honestly
Which brings us to grit, a word that has become almost as overused as resilience. Grit is Angela Duckworth's term for passion and perseverance in pursuit of long-term goals, the capacity to keep at something that matters over years rather than weeks. It is a genuinely useful idea, and it deserves an honest word about its limits. A large review of the research by Marcus Credé and colleagues found that grit overlaps heavily with the long-familiar trait of conscientiousness, and that its link with achievement is more modest than the popular story suggests. What held up best was the perseverance at its heart.
So I wouldn’t offer grit as a secret formula for success. I would offer it as something humbler and more useful: the willingness to keep returning, season after season, to tend something that grows slowly. Oaks are not made in a summer.
Making room for the oak
There is one last piece, and it concerns what we inherited. Much of what grows in us was planted by other hands, long before we could choose: beliefs about what we are allowed to want, how much we may need, what happens to people who struggle. Some of it served us well for a long season. Some of it, now that we have grown up around it, behaves more like a weed, crowding the light from what we are trying to become.
A weed, after all, isn’t a lesser plant. It’s simply something growing where we have come to decide we would rather it didn’t, and the deciding is ours. Clearing it is not a rejection of those who planted before us. It’s about light. When we clear away what no longer serves, the saplings of our own particular self, the ones that have been growing all along in the shade of borrowed things, finally reach the sun they need.
And given time, they do what saplings do. They become oaks, cedars or sequoias: slow-grown, deep-rooted, with a heartwood that is genuinely their own. Not untouched by the weather, and not pretending to be. Moved by it and still standing. That is what it means to become wind-firm.
And so I would leave you not with an answer but with the question I think matters most: not "how do I make sure nothing like this ever moves me again?" - because the wind will come, and a life spent bracing against it is its own kind of falling - but: “what might become possible if you stopped trying to be unmoved, and began, instead, to grow something the winds of life could pass through?”
Sources and further reading: on trees and wind, the growth response botanists call thigmomorphogenesis, by which wind-exposed trees develop thicker trunks and stronger roots; Ann Masten, "Ordinary Magic: Resilience Processes in Development" (American Psychologist, 2001); Marcus Aurelius, Meditations; Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way (2014); Angela Duckworth et al., "Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2007); Marcus Credé, Michael Tynan and Peter Harms, "Much Ado About Grit: A Meta-Analytic Synthesis of the Grit Literature" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2017).