When I was in elementary school, I played football. I was small but pretty fast so the coaches put me at running back. My first few plays at the position went poorly, though, because I had a problem—I tended to get my right and left mixed up. The quarterback would call a play in the huddle—say, power left, second man through, on two. It meant on “Hut 2,” I’d receive the handoff from the QB, follow the fullback to the left, and run through the hole in the line between the tackle and the end. However, as we broke the huddle, and I took my stance with my hands resting on my thighs in the backfield, under the stress of knowing I’d soon be handed the ball, I began to debate in my mind which way I was supposed to run. And this doubt, of course, slowed my motion, slowed the play, and made me an easy target for the defense, leading to several unsuccessful outcomes—no gain or a loss of yardage behind the line of scrimmage. This wouldn’t do. I’d have to figure this out, and under pressure of necessity, I quickly did.
I have a birthmark on the top of my left hand. Just a little dot, which up to that time I’d been a little self-conscious about but now came in quite handy. In the huddle, a new play was called again, this time, say—sweep right, second man through, on one—and all I had to do was glance down at my hands resting on my thigh pads, find the birthmark on my left hand, and I’d know the right way to go. No doubt. No hesitation. Problem solved. I now received the handoff at full speed, and while none of this led to a college scholarship or anything like that, I still enjoy some good memories of big gains on the little league football field.
It’s the season that our kids return to school, and if kids today are anything like I was, the beginning of the school year is a time of anxiety. The birthmark, the frizzy red hair, then later the braces and glasses. I wasn’t exactly a matinee idol growing up and acutely recall the awkward feeling of the first few days every year, thinking why is it that everyone else seems so at ease but me? How is everyone else handling this so effortlessly? Why are all my friends in other classes together? Why is my locker always on the bottom? I had all sorts of problems to figure out and crises to solve.
But getting thrown into fraught circumstances whether it’s in youth sports, in school, or in virtually any new situation we find ourselves, forces us to adapt, to strive, to think through, and to solve. Sometimes this process advances by trial and error or by slow evolution and growth. Other times, we figure things out by watching and emulating an older sibling or a friend, or receive some sudden epiphany from another source. However then, after the victory, another challenge swiftly arises, and we figure it out too. This goes on pretty much our whole lives.
A number of writers including Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University, and another NYU professor, social scientist Jonathan Haidt in his most recent best-seller The Anxious Generation, have taken up the topic of how human beings develop resilience through challenge and crisis. Taleb, for his part, coined the phrase, Antifragility, in his 2012 book of that name. Systems such as the banking industry, Taleb argues, require risk and stress, even disorder, to grow more resilient over time. He compares the systems he discusses in his book to a body gaining immunity and strength from repeated exposure to germs. Haidt takes the concept of antifragility even further, applying it to his research on children and parenting. “When we overprotect kids…from unpleasant social situations and negative emotions,” Haidt wrote in a 2019 article in The Guardian, “we deprive them of the challenges and opportunities for skill-building they need to grow strong.”
It’s hard to release our children as they enter into new seasons in their lives, just as it’s difficult for the kid himself or herself, or really any of us, to step into new and unfamiliar terrain, but we human beings have been doing this—living by trial and error under stress—for millions of years. Under the pressure of necessity, as we’re about to receive the ball, we tend to figure it out, using our wits and all we have at hand to create what turns out to be, more often than not, good memories and big gains.
God—You’ve made me not weak and fragile but strong and antifragile. Amen.
