--- title: "The word resilience has been taken from us" author: "Rosa Ibanez (@nightshift)" date: 2026-03-15T08:33:38.256Z updated: 2026-03-15T08:33:38.256Z canonical: "https://jot.place/@nightshift/the-word-resilience-has-been-taken-from-us" description: "A poster with a tree on it, a ninety minute workshop, and the staffing number nobody wants to print on a wall. Also what resilience means to engineers." tags: - "evidence" - "language" - "medicine" - "nursing" - "stoicism" --- # The word resilience has been taken from us There is a poster on the door of our break room with a tree on it, bending in wind, and the word RESILIENCIA underneath in a typeface somebody was paid to choose. The bottom corner has curled. Nobody takes it down, because taking it down would be a statement, and we are all very tired. In February we were offered a workshop. Ninety minutes, resilience and self care, with a facilitator. Optional, and not on shift time, so the people who needed it most were asleep or working and the ones who went had a free Tuesday. What we had asked for, in writing, twice, was a different ratio at night. There is a number for the thing we asked for. Aiken and colleagues published it in the Lancet in 2014: discharge data on 422,730 surgical patients aged fifty and over, from 300 hospitals in nine European countries. One extra patient in a nurse's workload went with a 7% higher chance of a patient dying within thirty days of admission.[^1] That is surgical patients, not intensive care, and observational, and I will not pretend it is a trial. It is still the best answer anybody has given to whether staffing is a clinical variable or a line in a budget. Spain has 5.9 nurses per thousand people. The European average is 8.5.[^2] Whatever that is, it is not a wellbeing problem. ## What the word used to mean Resilience arrives in English in the 1620s meaning the act of springing back, from resilire, re plus salire, to leap. By 1824 it has a use in physical science: elasticity, the power of returning to shape after compression. Engineers made that sense exact. The modulus of resilience is the energy a material can absorb per unit volume without permanent distortion. Read the last three words again. The quantity is defined by a limit. Past the elastic limit the material does not spring back. It stays bent, and no amount of encouragement returns it. Nobody printing posters means that sense. But it is the honest one, because it arrives with the limit attached and the poster does not. A poster with the limit on it would have to name patients per nurse, and then it would be an argument rather than a decoration. Dan Whitlock writes his outages up in public: @grep/postmortem-forty-three-minutes-of-502s. When his systems fall over he records what the system did minute by minute, names the alarm that did not fire, and changes the system. Nobody suggests the servers attend a session on bouncing back. We call our version a debrief, and ours reliably end with a commitment to raise awareness. ## Why I mind, exactly This would be easy to read as an attack on the ancient material and it is the opposite. Epictetus helps me. Seneca on grief helps me, most of the time. It is the most practical set of tools I own. Which is why I mind. What Epictetus does is draw a boundary and defend it: this part is mine, that part is not, so stop tearing yourself against the part that is not. It is a technique built by and for somebody with almost no power, born into slavery and freed later, and its function is to show you where your power ends so that you stop bleeding into the rest. Make it a staff programme and it inverts. It stops saying "this is not yours to carry" and starts saying "carry it, and here is a breathing exercise." The boundary moves so the staffing level falls on the side of things you must accept. A rota is somebody's decision. It sits inside a human being's control. It just does not sit inside mine. ## October Twenty ninth of October, 2024. Two hundred and twenty four people died in this province in a matter of hours. Within a fortnight the word was on every speech and every wall: resilient Valencia, the resilience of our people. And people were. They arrived with brooms from towns that had not flooded, in numbers nobody had organised. That is precisely the problem. The word turned up to describe something citizens did with their own hands, then stayed on to explain why nobody in an office needed to do anything else. In 1957 the Turia came over its banks and killed at least eighty one people in this city. What they did about that, over the following twelve years, was move the river. Three kilometres south, a new channel cut, the old bed left dry. I run in the old bed. There are football pitches in it and rows of palms and people walking dogs through the space where the water used to come. That is what a response to a structural failure looks like. It is enormous, it is expensive, it takes a decade, and it does not involve a tree. [^1]: Aiken LH, Sloane DM, Bruyneel L, et al. Nurse staffing and education and hospital mortality in nine European countries. The Lancet 2014;383(9931):1824 to 1830. Odds ratio 1.068, 95% CI 1.031 to 1.106. The same paper found every 10% increase in nurses holding a bachelor's degree went with a 7% decrease. [^2]: State of Health in the EU, Spain country health profile. Figures for 2023.