It might sound weird, but I am often secretly glad that I am a “singleton” – I don’t mean being single, I mean being born singly, not one of multiple births, especially not one of identical twins. It must be very distressing to have a “double” living so close in one’s life. We know we shouldn’t, but we all tend to compare. It is human nature to compare.
I once knew a set of identical twins. Their identicalness stops at their physical features. There was nothing else identical in all their other aspects. The older sister (by two minutes) was quiet, proper, unassuming and deferential; whereas the younger was bubbly, exuberant, outgoing and animated. If one was a water cracker, the other a sweet cookie; if one was a daisy, the other a rose. One was often overshadowed by the other, the background of a centrepiece.
One day I asked the older sister the most insensitive question, “Does it bother you that she (the younger sister) gets all the attention?” Her answer surprised me, more so because she was only 15 years old at the time, “I don’t like to attract attention. I’m glad that my sister and I are not the same. I think it helps that my parents accept us for who we are. My dad always said that he’s glad to have two daughters, instead of one in two different bodies.”
And this… IS RESILIENCE!
Resilience is to be confident and comfortable with who we are, without the need to compare ourselves with others; it is a strong sense of identity and self-acceptance.
The lesson I learnt: embrace our own strengths and uniqueness; when we grasp the fact that we are created uniquely for specific purposes, it gives us the assurance to be who we are.
If you are a parent, do not compare your children with anyone else; accept them for who they are, help them to discover their strengths and to become who they were created to be.
You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous – How well I know it. (Psalms 139: 13-14)
Real Life Resilience 