My daughter’s massively into Minecraft.
It’s screen-time we can all get behind, because it’s an opportunity to unleash her creativity in a way that is without boundary.
Here’s one of her creations that completely blew my mind: a cat, that you live inside.
The hat on its head is a penthouse suite and naturally there’s a pool beneath it, and a secret tunnel inside one of the flowerbeds that leads to an underground bunker of sorts.
😮
I got her to take this screenshot, because I thought it was just about the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
But… the other Saturday I was disturbed by a series of howls from downstairs, frantic footsteps on the stairs and a very, very, very upset 10 year old, who burst into the room to inform me that she’d accidentally died testing out some new feature, had failed to set a ‘re-spawn’ marker for the location of her home area… and consequently lost the lot.
🙀
She’s fairly well-versed in Minecraft lore, so had tried various tricks to find it again, but none had worked and she was reduced to wandering around aimlessly from the new spawn point in the empty world, looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
She knew it was over.
I think it’s fair to say I haven’t seen her that upset about anything, ever before. Inconsolable doesn’t even come close.
This was BIG.
She’d spent literally months building her world, with different homes, railways and rollercoasters galore, indoor and outdoor pet sanctuaries, beautiful blossom-filled gardens, libraries, even a mini-stadium to perform in… and now it was all gone.
💔
(It pains me even to recall just how distraught she was; thought’s powerful like that.)
I warned my wife, who was at work, that there’d be a grieving process occurring in the home when she returned, and that we’d probably have an extra-mopey child on our hands for a few days at the very least.
At bedtime there were more tears, as she lamented, “Dad, I miss my world!”
😩
I wanted to keep an eye on this one, to see how it played out, in the days that followed. Neither me nor my wife suggested any remedies, or tried to buck her up or anything.
It sucked and we acknowledged that it sucked.
The very next day she was back in Minecraft.
“Still searching?” I asked, tentatively.
“No. I just deleted it. No point; I’ll never find it. I’m building something new,” she replied, not super-enthusiastically, but not sad, either.
Just being creative again. Starting over.
To my amazement, the cat-house-world was never mentioned again. She just cracked on, and since then she’s made more amazing things that I regularly get called in to look at: “Dad! Look at this!” (I love it! 😍)
The very definition of ‘resilience’
For me, this is resilience in action, and bloody hell, do kids do it well?!
I have a definition of resilience, that takes into consideration the fact that what we experience in life, moment to moment, is a thought-created perceptual reality; a map, not the territory itself.
Put simply: we don’t experience the situations we face, we experience our thinking about them.
With that in mind, “resilience” can only be one thing:
And that’s what my daughter displayed, so adeptly. She didn’t hang on to the thinking she had about the Minecraft disaster – it just didn’t make sense.
She let it go, and moved on.
I must say, I’ve never been more proud of her. It brought a an actual tear to my eye, to see the effortless grace with which she handled the loss of something that was such a huge part of her life.
She’s such a great teacher, and I know this scenario will stay with me as a guide, when life next throws me a curveball.
And if at some point in the future, you ever get to read this, my sweet… know that you rock my world!
I love you.
💟
Giles
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Giles P Croft