What Nature Teaches About Resilience: A Marine's Perspective with Jamie Retherford Part 1 (of 2)
“Nature teaches us resilience. When a forest burns down, it’s going to come back stronger.”
YOUR KEY INSIGHTS FROM jamie
Dealing in Realities
“One of the things that was pretty influential for me is just looking out in nature and seeing that it's a dangerous game. People can die. Just look at National Geographic .. watching animals fall after each other. It's hard. And one of the hugest realizations that I had is the moment that you realize everything's just hard. Life is hard. There's a paradox in that it, everything gets easy. Because now you're dealing in realities, you're not dealing in fantasies, where your spirit gets crushed, because you didn't realize how hard life was. When you're dealing in realities like that, you start to have the expectation of, Oh, this is so hard. And then when it turns out easy, man, you know, this is a cakewalk. I'm over the moon. I don't even realize that before.”
Choosing the Harder Path
My mother was going to college. And it was at that time that President Marcos declared martial law. So he basically took over the country. So she knew it was time to get out of there. And as Providence would have it, she was actually studying computer science in the 1980s as a female. A lot of people can attribute their success to, I worked so hard, and I did this and that. We were lucky. We were very, very lucky. And I always say that to myself. Maybe it's a self fulfilling prophecy. But I've been lucky on my my entire life. So she comes to America in the 1980s with my dad, with a leather jacket and $500. In the 1980s, with a computer science degree, pretty much everyone will take you. She created a life for us.
I had always known that she sacrificed that much - she was hungry, that people made fun of her because she didn't have as much as others. And growing up in an Asian household, it's a little bit different. We'd always hear things like, you can be whatever you want - a doctor or a lawyer. I'm a lawyer. But basically, that was it. I had the typical Tiger Mom. I walked uphill both ways walking to school. And you're just like, physics was not a thing back when you went to school. My brother and I were very acutely aware of the challenges that our parents faced. The Asian culture is such that you want to make their sacrifice worth it. And you never want to be that black sheep, where we wasted our money on Jamie's tuition. So, we had to have a plus on our report cards. We always had a passion for excellence. Not only because, it was the right thing to do to approach life with quality. But also, I wanted to honor all the sacrifices of the people that came before me.
When I was young, I wanted to do everything that was hard, because I still had a lot to prove. Obviously college was a given in our family, everyone goes to college. But next was law school. What's the hardest thing I could do? My choices were limited to doctor or lawyer. And so I chose that path. But then, I remember the second year of law school, just wanting to be a JAG, which is a judge, advocate, basically an attorney for the military. I had no idea what branch I wanted to go for. And you have constantly recruiters coming on campus. We had Navy, with the best beaches in the world. Your access to army comes in: you get an iPhone, we'll give you free college. Air Force, pretty much the same. And Marine Corps, in not so nice words, basically said, Who the heck do you think you are? If my goal is to do the hardest thing all the time, that definitely spoke to my soul. And I said, That's the one.”
battles in nature
“It absolutely was the hardest thing for someone of my stature to engage in. So I'm four foot eleven. And I at the time that I was in the Marine Corps, I weighed 107 pounds. I measured my backpack that we do 15 mile marches in, with the rifle, sort of changing my gait and making me sort of fall over sometimes because of this length and weight balance. It was 68 pounds. I passed out twice. Once from heatstroke, and once from heat exhaustion. They have a painful way to sort of rejuvenate you and get your core temperature down. They've got to rub you in an ice bath in a kiddie pool basically, for about 45 minutes straight, just to get you to cool down to something that's manageable for your body. So I've definitely had my battles with nature. And nature wins. There's there's no fantasy about that.
But it was challenging. For every step that somebody that was six foot tall, I had to take about three steps. I remember very specifically during the competent convocation when we actually do get our bars pinned on to our uniform, meaning, you're now a second lieutenant. I remember thinking, how did I even get here? It was a force of nature, it was not by my own power, I just felt like overtaken by the will to succeed at doing a very hard thing. And, I had done it. And when I received my Eagle globe and anchor, this is a special thing for a Marine, you know that that never gets taken away from you. But I felt like I was standing on top of the mountain….and it just makes you want to climb more mountains.”
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