First, we cause our own destruction, then we recover.
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Idiom: Rise from the ashes
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
We use the phrase rise from the ashes to encourage people to be renewed after suffering destruction of some kind.
People often comment on how remarkable it was if someone was able to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and get on with life after experiencing a traumatic event.
It is, however, what most humans do.
We are a very resilient race of beings.
If you are a fan of Harry Potter or were alive during the Harry Potter boom from the late 1990s to 2010, you may remember that Dumbledor had a pet phoenix.
In Greek mythology, a phoenix is a bird that lives for a very long time.
Then, when they’ve lived long enough, they suddenly burst into flames and are gone, leaving behind nothing but ashes.
That’s when the amazing thing occurs; a new phoenix rises from the ashes.
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That may seem like a fantastic thing, but when Fawkes, Dumbledore’s phoenix, burst into flames, Dumbledore was not surprised.
He was not surprised because Fawkes was doing what phoenixes do; they burn and then rise from the ashes.
I think this may be one way for us to build resilience within ourselves.
For humans, rising from the ashes is one of the things we do best.
Sure, most of the time, we caused our own destruction.
We tend to be our own worst enemy for some reason.
But if we can accept the truth that we are naturally very resilient, I think it will help make it easier for us to believe that no matter what calamity befalls us, like Fawkes, we too can rise from the ashes.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 73.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.