Some lessons nobody teaches you directly. They arrive sideways, in a garden, on a Sunday morning, hands in the soil.

I grew up in Niort, in a simple and warm family. My father worked at the post office. My mother at an insurance company. Both ten minutes from home, both present. Life was ordinary, shaped by seasons, harvests, and walks in the forest.

But it was precisely in that ordinariness that I learnt resilience.

The garden as first teacher

My father spent his weekends in the garden. Fruit, vegetables, strawberries. He never explained how to do things, he showed me. Shelling peas, picking what was ripe, watching what grew slowly.

The strawberry, in particular, taught me everything. It grows close to the ground. It asks for attention, for patience. It does not rush. And when it is ready, it gives everything it has.

I was five years old. I did not yet know I was learning to wait, to observe, to trust the process.

Difficult moments have their role too

Childhood was not perfect. There were fears, the dark cellar, recurring nightmares. There were punishments that felt unfair at the time. Moments where I found myself alone with something difficult to digest, literally and figuratively.

But those moments built something. Not by hardening me, by teaching me that discomfort passes. That tomorrow exists. That you can walk through what frightens you without it destroying you.

That is resilience in its rawest form. Not a technique. A repeated experience.

What nature taught me

Sunday walks in the forest with my parents remain among my most formative memories. He would stop in front of an ant colony and say: look. Just that. Look.

Those ants were building something enormous for their size, with no visible leader, no apparent plan. Each one knew what it had to do.

It took me years to understand what that image had given me: strength does not always come from noise. It often comes from quiet, steady work, rooted in something larger than yourself.

The lesson I still carry today

Forty years of international life later, twenty countries crossed, several lives in one, that curiosity and that ability to get back up are still here. Intact. They come from that garden in Niort, those forest walks, that childhood that taught me without saying so.

Resilience is not learnt in personal development books. It is built in the small difficult moments of childhood, when you do not yet have words for what you are going through, but you go through it anyway.

And you, what experience from your childhood taught you to get back up?

Elisabeth Court, known as Babette
Author of The Strawberry Wisdom