The soil pressed close, heavier than it ever remembered.
It wasn’t cruel—at least not entirely—but it was not kind either. Each grain tightened its embrace, each stone leaned in a little more, each root jostled to carve its space. What had once been shelter now felt like an unending test.
Yet the Potato did not break.
Not yet. Not now.
It held itself steady, though the strain hummed through every fibre of its being. But a thought surfaced: What if I am not strong enough? What if this is the day the weight finds me hollow, the day I split?
The Potato silenced the question, but silence didn’t mean absence. It stayed there, throbbing, as the soil pressed harder.
Resilience, the Potato thought, was not a wall. It was not armour. It was something softer, something stranger.
I do not resist the soil. I live with it.
The pressure was both enemy and gift. The weight that made its skin ache was also the weight that cradled it in darkness, away from the burning sun above. The soil suffocated, yes, but it also sheltered. It strained, but it also fed.
Could a burden also be a blessing? Could the same pressure that tested its limits also define its very being?
Maybe resilience is not about winning. Maybe it is about staying. Maybe it is about breathing without air, growing without moving, hoping without knowing if hope makes sense.
Time passed. Or perhaps it didn’t. The earth gave no clocks. But in the stillness, the Potato heard the quiet language of soil—the faint trickle of unseen water, the scurrying vibrations of distant creatures, the echo of storms that shattered skies far above.
All the stories whispered the same word: endure.
And the Potato whispered back, though it had no mouth: I am trying.
There were days when it felt thin, stretched to breaking. Stones pressed their skin until tiny pains rippled deep. Roots tugged and tangled, reminding it that even down here, it was not alone.
Fragile. I am fragile. What if fragility means I am failing?
But another thought rose slowly, like water creeping through dry soil: No… fragility is not weakness. Fragility is proof I am alive.
Only lifeless things do not bend. Only the dead do not ache. To strain, to quiver, to feel the soil press in until you nearly split—that was not failure. That was existence.
To bend is to live. To bend is to remain unbroken.
Growth came slowly, almost imperceptibly. New threads of root nudged outward, testing, searching. Each one seemed to ask: Is there space for me here? Is there a crack to slip through? Sometimes there was. Sometimes not. Sometimes a root pressed against a stone and snapped.
The sting lingered, but the Potato persisted. Another root would try again.
This is what resilience feels like. Not triumph. Not glory. Just persistence. Just trying again, and again, and again.
It is often thought of as ending. Was there a moment when the soil would finally be too much, when the pressure would crack it open from within? The thought did not frighten it the way it once might have.
Perhaps resilience isn’t about avoiding endings. Perhaps it’s about arriving at them whole, carrying myself all the way there.
Resilience, then, was not immortality. It was honouring the path toward fragility, walking it slowly, without shame.
One day, a trickle of water found its way down. It slid along a stone, pooling near. The Potato’s roots quivered with hunger, reaching, drinking deep. The nourishment was quiet, almost ordinary, but it felt like grace.
I did nothing to earn this. I only waited. Is that what resilience is? A kind of faith that if I endure long enough, something will come?
It was not a celebration. It was simply absorption, patient and silent.
But not all days were gifts. Some were empty. Some brought only silence and pressing weight. Some made the Potato wonder:
Why? Why keep going if each day is the same, if each ache returns, if nothing changes?
The answer came not as revelation, but as persistence itself:
Because I am still here. Because even asking the question means I have endured enough to ask it.
Resilience was not a destination. It was the ability to say still here—again, and again, and again.
In its silence, the Potato realised that resilience was not something hidden deep within it, a secret resource it pulled from nowhere. Resilience was a conversation.
The soil pressed, and it pressed back. The stones leaned in, and the roots curved around them. The weight tightened, and the Potato found new shapes to fit. In every exchange, both were altered—the soil shifted, however slightly; the Potato stretched, however subtly.
I am not alone in this. The soil and I shape one another.
Resilience was not isolation. It was a collaboration.
But collaboration was not gentle. Sometimes it was cruel. A root snapped; a scar formed. A patch of skin bruised beneath gravel. The Potato winced inwardly.
It hurts. I don’t want to admit it, but it hurts.
Resilience did not erase the sting. It was not about denying wounds. It was about saying, even wounded, I am still whole.
One day, faint tremors shook the soil. Vibrations above—maybe rain, maybe the passing of a creature. The Potato had no way of knowing. But it knew this: it had not been unearthed. It had not been crushed. It was still here.
Still here. How strange, how quiet, how simple that feels. Perhaps resilience isn’t loud at all. Perhaps it’s just the softest whisper: I remain.
The seasons shifted above, though the Potato knew them only through their echoes—the faint warmth that seeped down, the sudden chill that stiffened the soil. And through them all, it endured.
Not unchanged. Not untouched. Its body had thickened, its roots spread further, its skin carried tiny scars like forgotten poems written in silence. Resilience had not made it harder; it had made it deeper.
Maybe that is the point. Not to harden, not to resist, but to deepen. To carry weight without collapsing beneath it.
In the long stillness, the Potato settled into peace. Not triumph, not victory—just peace.
Resilience was not about being more than what it was. It was about remaining what it was, despite everything pressing in.
The soil pressed. The Potato remained.
And in that truth, there was no pride, no celebration. Only steadiness.
A stillness so complete that no collapse could touch it.
A stillness that was, in itself, resilience.
