Where then can we find the strength?
In oneself, deep within oneself? Or outside of oneself – outside of us, in the relationship with others so important for the social animals that we are?
Finding strength within yourself, the idea is at first glance stimulating: perhaps we do indeed have unsuspected resources deep within us, which we can mobilize in times of adversity…
Our will for example, this faculty which is never deployed as much as in the face of resistance and which is, according to Descartes, what is divine within us.
Our imagination too, which feeds on the obstacles to overcome.
Our survival instinct, which perhaps awaits the test of adversity to wake up and change into energy, inventiveness, a force of resistance
Among these resources deep within us, there is also the possibility of seeking our love of life, our deep confidence in existence, it is precisely when life is hard that we must know how to summon them or, more precisely, find them.
The German philosopher Husserl speaks of an original confidence, a confidence that is there from the beginning of life, is it this confidence that we need to rediscover?
Yes. Since we originally come into the world, in birth, confidence is less to be conquered than to be found again.
But most often, we need others to find these resources within us: a beautiful relationship of love or friendship, the meeting of a therapist with whom we will form a relationship. beautiful therapeutic alliance, and in the hardest cases we will need the meeting of what Boris Cyrulnik, in the wake of the American psychologist Emmy Werner, calls a resilience tutor. It is then a question of finding strength in others or rather in our relationship with others.
Sometimes we even start to feel better when we stop believing that everything depends on us and that we have to figure it out on our own, without anyone's help.
“Real life is an encounter,” writes Martin Buber, who influenced most of the philosophers of otherness of the 20th century, from Husserl to Sartre via Levinas: there are even encounters that save our lives. Finding strength in a quality of connections allows us to understand that we sometimes have to go outside of ourselves to find the way out. And once again, the overly voluntary idea of wanting to get by on your own can be a major obstacle to this newfound strength.
Finally, coming out of oneself means opening up to the world, relying on it, finding strength in this reunion even with the very forces of the world: the sun, nature, the rivers, the trees, the cosmic energy among the Stoics, the laws of nature according to Spinoza, the vital momentum of which Bergsonian speaks so well…
And how do we do it? The cosmos of the Stoics or the Bergsonian élan vital may seem a little abstract…
How do we do it? But I will answer you: we open our eyes, we breathe, we walk in the forest, kiss the trees, we watch the migratory birds pass by and we feel this vital impulse in their wings, we swim in the cold water… we finally open ourselves to our presence in the world and to the presence in the world, and of course we take care of the world since this world is our home; we stop emptying it of its resources because it is our house that we are destroying and letting burn while looking away…
Contemplating the beauty of nature is sometimes enough to console us, or even to make us once again capable of consenting to our life, even if imperfect.
Our torments suddenly seem very different to us, much smaller, less scandalous too, when we relearn to inhabit the mystery of the world, when we rediscover contact with what goes beyond us and passes through us at the same time. This force which comes from the world, like that which others sometimes give us, then enters us to become ours.
And moments of fatigue remind us of what we are tempted to forget in hours of triumph: we are never as much ourselves as when we know how to open ourselves to what is not us. Our greatest strength is not within us but outside of us, in meeting others and the world.
