Devlin Brown at the water cooler: United in our built-in resilience

Do you have advice on building real resilience in the gym? I just can’t bring myself to focus on lifting weights or running because I am too distracted by life’s knocks. 

Jargon is a drug that marketing departments feed to their executive committee in a mutually beneficial cycle of drowning in their own Kool-Aid. Resilience has joined agility, innovation, unlocking efficiencies, circling back, change agents, pain points, touch points and inflection points in the jargon stash.

Just recently, while sitting next to someone who was scrolling through Instagram reels I heard a fitluencer give a life-changing tip on “building the resilience required to succeed in training”. For the life of me I can’t remember what she said. 

It’s a pity the word has lost its lustre. Because, without actual resilience you will not succeed at anything, never mind training. Sometimes readers tell me that sharing personal anecdotes makes my content (more jargon) even more relatable. 

In the past six weeks I have had to navigate a sudden death in the family. That on its own was enough. Then my happy dog died. All my pet fish died within hours because I made a mistake during pond maintenance. 

During the same six-week period, a broken sewer pipe deep beneath the most inaccessible part of my property turned the garden into a swamp of my own you-know-what. A pipe burst in my ceiling turning my bedroom into the Valley of the Waves at the start of a day with tight work deadlines, and for the first time, and hopefully the last, someone broke into my house while I was sleeping. Grief, attending to estate affairs, repairs, security upgrades, insurance companies, SAPS ... navigating this disruption while delivering at work has been tough. 

Yet I know this pales in comparison to what others are enduring. With this perspective, I relate to how you feel. Walking into the gym requires the fortitude of Marcus Aurelius. Lifting weights feels heavier than ever. The intensity is down 50%. There are days I’d rather just lie in bed. It’s not easy. But is fighting through toxic work or personal relationships any easier? What about not knowing what you’ll eat or where you’ll sleep tonight?

Every day I read SA’s media and I realise we already have the recipe needed to build resilience. I read an article about the new Joburg mayor, in his second incarnation, acknowledging problems and referring to attempts to fix them, yet seemingly downplaying the state of the city, reminding us that all cities, even New York and Paris, struggle with electricity. 

Houses in my suburb, and every suburb around mine, have water tanks and pump backup systems precisely because the city has failed us — there is never a guarantee that water will flow, and when it doesn’t you’re carrying buckets to the toilet for days on end. 

The broken electricity distribution network has shredded house alarms, electric fences, gate motors and appliances. Those shiny solar panel roofs aren’t just for load-shedding. No single person in New York or Paris has spent as much of their own salaries as South Africans (who have the means) in securing their own basic services — from utilities to security to health to education. And what about the poor? 

Despite this, YouTubers who’ve travelled to this country remark consistently about how friendly the people in SA are, rich and poor alike. We take the abuse with a smile — a defiant resilience of “you will not break us”. Painfully divided, yet strangely united.

While MMA is not everyone’s cup of tea, the Springboks adopted UFC heavyweight champion Dricus du Plessis’ famous quote in their first match against Ireland at Loftus. A huge banner across the top of the stadium read: “Hulle weet nie wat ons weet nie.”

It refers to the fact that South Africans of all backgrounds have a built-in resilience that makes us formidable in all walks of life, not just sport. As a nation, we are like the callused hands of a seasoned bricklayer.

My advice is to acknowledge how strong you can be and then build a plan with clear goals for every workout. If you can find a training partner or afford a personal trainer, do it. Letting someone else down is, strangely, harder than the tragedy of letting ourselves down.