In environmental science, one of the central objectives is to understand why some ecosystems change when other ecosystems do not.

Suppose a factory fire results in 10 tonnes of industrial chemicals entering a nearby river. Broadly speaking, we can imagine three outcomes:

  1. Permanent damage. The chemicals overwhelm the river ecosystem, which becomes permanently wrecked. Even after the chemicals disperse into the environment and drop to a concentration of zero, the river ecosystem ceases to function.
  2. Resistance. The chemicals cause no detectable change in the ecosystem.
  3. Resilience. The chemicals temporarily overwhelm the river ecosystem. However, the ecosystem’s functions gradually process the chemical input (say, via bacteria that decompose the industrial chemical into less toxic components). The river ecosystem soon returns to a functional, healthy state, which might be a bit different to its original state.

The second and third outcomes result, eventually, in the same end state: the ecosystem ends up basically as it was. But the pathways to get there are very different. In the second outcome (resistance), perhaps the chemical concentration or volume simply isn’t enough to overwhelm the ecosystem’s natural processes. In the third outcome (resilience), the system does become overwhelmed, but it eventually deals with the disturbance and returns to normal.

Connell and Ghedini (2015) distinguish between resistance and resilience as follows:

  • Resistance: the capacity of a system to absorb the effects of disturbance without changing.
  • Resilience: the capacity of a system to reorganise and return to a prior state after a disturbance.

My favorite Buddhist text is the Simile of the Saw (Majjhima Nikāya 21). This text focuses on how to respond when other people in life do things to hurt you. In this text, the Buddha addresses his community of mendicants (monks) as follows:

Suppose a person was to come along carrying a spade and basket and say, ‘I shall make this great earth be without earth!’ And they’d dig all over, scatter all over, spit all over, and urinate all over, saying, ‘Be without earth! Be without earth!’

What do you think, mendicants? Could that person make this great earth be without earth?

No, sir. Why is that? Because this great earth is deep and limitless. It’s not easy to make it be without earth. That person will eventually get weary and frustrated.

[…] Suppose a person was to come along carrying a blazing grass torch, and say, ‘I shall burn and scorch the river Ganges with this blazing grass torch.’

What do you think, mendicants? Could that person burn and scorch the river Ganges with a blazing grass torch?

No, sir. Why is that? Because the river Ganges is deep and limitless. It’s not easy to burn and scorch it with a blazing grass torch. That person will eventually get weary and frustrated.

Source: SuttaCentral

To me, the Buddha is speaking about resistance — he is teaching his monastic followers to become sufficiently large and expansive, with an open heart and a loving mind, such that they cannot be easily hurt by others.

Resistance also underpins my experience developing many of the common skills from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). In CBT, you can learn how to address harmful thoughts or beliefs by diffusion (letting them go) or by challenging those thoughts and beliefs with evidence. In both cases, the mind absorbs the disturbance without changing very much.

But resistance, while invaluable, only gets you so far. Try telling somebody in the dark depths of despair to simply let go of their thoughts. Trust me when I say it doesn’t work.

In those cases, what is needed is not resistance — it is resilience. If we are experiencing intense despair or distress, we need a way to climb out of that dark hole. We need a way to reorganize the system after the disturbance. I’m speaking from my own experience here.

There is no one cure for depression. There are lots of little cures. As expressed by Dr Alex Korb: “After many years of research, I’ve come to understand that there is no one big solution to depression, but there are many small ones.”

I have been developing the skill of resilience — once a disturbance overwhelms by resistance skills, and I fall into that dark pit, to reorganize my mind and gradually return to a healthy function. For me, the many small solutions seem to involve exercise, eating well, engaging with passion projects, spending time with my loved ones, taking my medication and my hormones, getting fresh air, and sticking to core priorities. Taking that first step, when all I want to do is remain curled up in a ball under the blanket, is really, really hard. But the first step leads to the second step, and gradually the steps accumulate into my mind reorganizing itself and recovering from the disturbance.

I need both resistance and resilience. I am working to develop both skillsets. Even if I can improve my resistance by 5% and my resilience by 5%, then I am likely to encounter fewer disturbances and to recover from those disturbances a bit sooner. Those small gains, accumulated over my lifetime, will mean a significant improvement in my quality of life.

Here’s the beautiful part. Even if a system is resilient, it does not need to return to its original state. A resilient ecosystem, once it has recovered from a disturbance, does not necessarily look the same as it did before — there might be new plant species taking the place of old ones. In my own life, the biggest disturbances seem to be followed by the greatest periods of personal growth. By no means does that personal growth outweigh the disturbance; the pain of extreme depression is intense, and I would not wish that pain on my worst enemy. But once I take those first few steps — I eat a simple meal, I spend a few minutes on the exercise bike, I make plans to see a beloved friend — then it is a silver lining to know that I might grow into something stronger.

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