Sometimes reorder means sitting in the wake of particularly challenging changes and gradually moving into stability without any immediate gain or discernible value. In time we tend to find meaning and grow from these events. But in the moment, being patient and gentle on ourselves is the best, and perhaps only, course to take.

Meanwhile, judging yourself for feeling down, or internalizing the idea that there is something wrong with you when you are sad (or that sadness is a weakness), only makes whatever you are going through harder.

The goal of rugged flexibility is to get to a favorable reorder; to maintain a strong core identity, but at the same time, to adapt, evolve, and grow. Unlike old ways of approaching change, rugged flexibility conceives of change not as an acute event that happens to you, but rather as a constant of life, a cycle in which you are an ongoing particip

Sometimes the work of rugged flexibility is simply showing up and getting through. Meaning and growth cannot be forced. They must come on their own time. Fortunately, as we’ll see in the coming pages, if we can learn to get out of our own way, they almost always do.

Hope, writes the moral philosopher Kieran Setiya,18 “keeps the flicker of potential agency alive.”

the Tao Te Ching, published in 400 BCE, Lao Tzu asked, “Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?” Whatever darkness you may be facing, perhaps the most important piece of knowledge to hold onto, even if just barely, is that what feels like forever now will not in the future. If this insight gives you the streng

life is full of things that are hard to face.

For particularly devastating and unprecedented changes—experiences like loss, illness, and identity crises—the psychological immune system does not work immediately. It takes time to marshal the resources necessary

contrast, if we can relax into an attitude that is more like a dance with [life], simply being with it as the situation unfolds, no striving or struggling necessary,