In my last post, I wrote about acceptance— about learning to let go of who we were and embrace who we’re becoming. Today’s theme moves from acceptance to what comes next: resilience.
Resilience isn’t about being unbreakable. It’s about getting knocked down, learning from it, and standing back up— again and again. It’s the quiet discipline that turns setbacks into stories.
For my artist hour, the subject was the mandala. At first glance, it looks complex— layers of symmetry, detail, and geometry that seem impossible to build and no real place to start. But once you break it down, you realize it’s actually simple. A few basic shapes, repeated with care and consistency, to form something beautiful.
That’s resilience in a nutshell. Life might look chaotic from the outside, but when you slow down and focus on one pattern, one step, one breath at a time, it starts to make sense. Each repeated action— each line drawn, each challenge faced—becomes part of something bigger.
The Inktober prompt for today was “reckless.” That word made me laugh, because we’ve all had our reckless moments and it is easy to come up with a few candid examples from my adventures. I don’t know what you picture when you hear it— maybe a good story, maybe a lesson learned the hard way— but it’s part of being human. Recklessness teaches us where the edges are. And resilience is what we use to climb back from them.
Whether it’s a reckless choice, a rough patch, or a bad tattoo you learned from, resilience is the art of turning the temporary mess into lifelong meaning. It’s about owning your past without letting it define your limits.
That’s how I see tattooing, too. Every healed piece tells a story of endurance— the sting, the time, the patience, the care. The skin adapts, the ink settles, and the art lives on. It’s proof that beauty and struggle can exist in the same space.
Resilience is built one small, intentional act at a time— just like the mandala. It’s not about being fearless; it’s about showing up again after fear has had its say.
Next time, I’ll be writing about purpose—because after we’ve trusted, waited, accepted, and endured, it’s time to ask what all that effort is building toward.