"Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings"
About this Quote
A canyon is not a fragile thing, and Kubler-Ross knows it. The line lands because it rejects the comforting fantasy that we can protect people into wholeness. Windstorms are framed as violent, even senseless forces, yet they’re also the artisans of the landscape. The metaphor flatters neither suffering nor the sufferer; it simply insists on a hard ecological truth: shaping happens through abrasion, pressure, and time.
Kubler-Ross’s context matters here. As the psychiatrist who helped mainstream conversations about death and dying, she spent her career watching families, institutions, and clinicians reach reflexively for shields: euphemisms, denial, sedation of feeling, the brisk “stay positive” script. In that world, “shielding” isn’t kindness; it’s control. It’s an attempt to keep grief from making a mess, to keep patients from terrifying us with their pain. Her sentence turns that impulse back on the listener. If you block the storm, you don’t eliminate suffering; you eliminate the evidence of survival, adaptation, depth.
The subtext is almost a dare: stop treating hardship as a glitch in the human experience and start seeing it as one of its formative mechanisms. Not because pain is good, but because pain is real and, when met honestly, it leaves contours - insight, humility, a widened capacity for empathy. The “true beauty” isn’t prettiness; it’s the stark, earned elegance of someone who has been weathered and is still standing.
Kubler-Ross’s context matters here. As the psychiatrist who helped mainstream conversations about death and dying, she spent her career watching families, institutions, and clinicians reach reflexively for shields: euphemisms, denial, sedation of feeling, the brisk “stay positive” script. In that world, “shielding” isn’t kindness; it’s control. It’s an attempt to keep grief from making a mess, to keep patients from terrifying us with their pain. Her sentence turns that impulse back on the listener. If you block the storm, you don’t eliminate suffering; you eliminate the evidence of survival, adaptation, depth.
The subtext is almost a dare: stop treating hardship as a glitch in the human experience and start seeing it as one of its formative mechanisms. Not because pain is good, but because pain is real and, when met honestly, it leaves contours - insight, humility, a widened capacity for empathy. The “true beauty” isn’t prettiness; it’s the stark, earned elegance of someone who has been weathered and is still standing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Resilience |
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