"The only easy day was yesterday"

The U.S. Navy SEALs have a saying (it's used so frequently that I almost would think it is a motto),  "The only easy day was yesterday."  BUD/S ("Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training) is a grueling, incredibly intense, 24-week long "school" that both tests and trains sailors to become part of the elite special forces Navy SEALs.  The course emphasizes leadership training, as well as mental and physical stamina.  Approximately five weeks into BUD/S is "Hell Week", where SEAL candidates can look forward to 4 hours of sleep the entire week, 20 hours per day of intense physical activity, and more than 200 miles total of running.  Very few SEAL candidates finish BUD/S, which is one of the reasons the motto, "The only easy day was yesterday" is so appropriate.  Completing BUD/S requires incredible stamina (both physically and mentally), dedication, fortitude, and resilience.

The psychologist Angela Duckworth has studied resilience extensively (some of her test subjects have been Navy SEALs in fact) and wrote a book called "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance".  A number of researchers have studied "resilience" and "grit" - one of the universal findings is that individuals who are faced with and seem to do fine during periods of incredible physical, mental, and emotional stress have one thing in common - a feeling that they and not their circumstances largely determine what happens to them in life.  Resilient individuals are "masters of their fate" (see the poem, Invictus) - they believe that whatever happens to them, they are in control of how they respond and make it through to the end.  Sounds a lot like the Navy SEALs, correct?  In other words, the one thing that we can control, no matter the circumstances, is our attitude.  And the more positive our attitude, the more likely that we will be able to respond successfully to whatever the world throws our way.

I have been thinking about resilience a lot lately.  I recently heard that Chief Justice John Roberts of the United States Supreme Court recently gave the "commencement address" at his son's ninth grade graduation ceremony.  However, instead of the usual platitudes that we hear too frequently at commencement speeches, Chief Justice Roberts used a different approach.  In the middle of the speech, he said the following:

Now the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.

Chief Justice Roberts is giving his son's classmates a very valuable lesson here.  Don't expect that things will always be fine and dandy - at times, you will run into mean, nasty people.  At some point in your life, someone will cheat you or take advantage of you.  And on some occasion in the future, you will fail.  Rather than yielding to the temptation to just crawl into a corner and sulk, instead of focusing on the fact that someone got the best of you, either fairly or unfairly, and rather than seeing the negatives in any one particular situation, (1) embrace the hard times, (2) learn from mistakes and failures, and (3) look at the positives.  In other words, BE RESILIENT.

You could certainly look at the SEALs' motto and say that it means that every day is going to be harder and harder.  However, with Angela Duckworth (among others) and Chief Justice John Roberts in mind, I will interpret the motto in a more positive light.  Yes, there are always going to be tough times ahead.  But you made it through today, and if you can make it through today, you will make it through tomorrow.  "The only easy day was yesterday", but "It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll.  I am the master of my fate.  I am the captain of my soul."