Conserving Change, Cultivating Resilience
Seasons of "re-purposing," resilience and renewal
The Turning of the Harvest
The fields are shifting. While the bright reds, golds and oranges of heirloom tomatoes continue to take center stage, the farmshare basket now carries evidence of heavier treasures: bold mauve beets and multi-colored carrots. The rhythm of the harvest is moving toward heartier foods, preparing our bodies and kitchens for the cooler autumnal months ahead. This serves as a reminder that resilience is never about holding one season forever. It is about yielding, conserving change, and finding nourishment in each turning.
Resilience is less about permanence than about finding strength in the shift.
Resilience as Regeneration
Lately I have been thinking deeply about resilience—not as a slogan, but as a practice. In medicine and leadership, we are so often told to be resilient, as though it were a fixed trait, the “grit” we either have or do not. But resilience, I have learned, is far more dynamic. It asks us to bend with change, to grow in response to pressures, and sometimes to let go entirely so that something new may emerge.
Just before the pandemic, I returned to family medicine as an employed physician in a larger leadership role, with imposter syndrome trailing me like an old ghost. After years of running my own practice, I wondered: was I equipped to direct others who had more longevity with that organization, and to carry the weight of systems under strain? I learned, through trial and humility, that resilience did not mean holding everything together alone. It meant cultivating the conditions in which others could step forward, where shared leadership and mutual care became the scaffolding that held us. It meant, finding the “sweet spot of confidence,” as organizational psychologist Dr. Adam Grant wrote in his aptly titled book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know.
Resilience in leadership is being certain enough to act when necessary, but humble enough to learn when not.
Resilience is not a solitary act—it is regenerative. Human ecologist Dr. Philip Loring reminds us that regeneration in food systems, for example, is less about specific practices and more about the conservation of change: working with the natural cycles of release and renewal. He writes: “Wherever human activities actively resist natural variability and change to achieve highly structured and uniform outcomes, environmental degradation will result.” In contrast, when we honor diversity (like the diversity of the heirlooms above) and remain flexible, we create the conditions where resilience is possible.
Regeneration happens when we work with cycles of change rather than against them.
Re-Purposing with Intention
I think of this as I place my father’s art on the walls of my home. After his passing in July 2024, my mother gifted me with several pieces, including one “paint by numbers” treasure from when he was a boy. I also received back many photographs and framed pieces of my own writing. Their weight is not only aesthetic—it is emotional, connective, a living link.
Like me, my father was a family physician. Over the course of his career, he saw his profession change dramatically, yet he remained resilient. He met each shift not with bitterness, but with intentional positivity, adapting his purpose as medicine evolved. The art he left behind now carries that same legacy of adaptation and renewal.
Here I faced a choice: to simply re-use these works as decoration, or to re-purpose them with intention. I chose the latter. Each piece has been given a place where it can speak into daily life, reminding me of my father’s creativity and our shared exchange of art and words. In this way, they become not only relics of what was, but invitations to carry his spirit forward. They remind me that resilience in grief is not about endurance alone, but about transformation.
Re-purposing allows memory, skill, and story to move into new life rather than staying fixed in the past.
This same lens of intentional re-purposing can extend to our own talents, skills, and knowledge. What if resilience is not about continuing in the same ways, but about using what we have differently—redeploying our gifts in new contexts, for new purposes? This is how both individuals and systems regenerate.
Lessons from Art at the Edge
This, too, is what I heard in my recent Radio Maine conversation with Portland Art Gallery artist Ann Trainor Domingue. Her work often dwells at the edges—where land meets sea, or where two figures clasp hands. She spoke of sketchbooks filled with fragments, accidents, and experiments that sometimes take years to ripen into paintings. She described the play of subtraction and addition, of sanding away or wiping over until something essential emerges.
Ann’s willingness to re-purpose fragments of older work into new pieces reflects the same principle. She leaves space for accidents, for new relationships between color and line, for the conservation of change within her own practice. In this openness lies a quiet resilience—not clinging to a single outcome, but trusting the cycles of creation, loss, revision, and renewal.
As Ann explained: “I don’t want to be so meticulous that every single stroke or line needs to be perfect… I am trying to keep a lot more open time, and that’s what this abstraction practice is allowing me to do.”
True creativity thrives when we allow unfinished fragments to find their new purpose over time.
The Thread Through All Things
So I find myself returning to this truth: resilience is not about bouncing back, as if nothing happened. It is about absorbing change and emerging with new purpose. It is about re-purposing art, talents, and experiences with intention. It is about reorienting, sometimes painfully, toward the next season. It is about conserving change, whether in the soil, in leadership, in art, or in the tender act of placing a father’s painting in its new home.
Reflection Prompt: Where in your life right now are you being asked not simply to endure, but to re-purpose with intention? What would it look like to conserve change, rather than resist it?
✨ Thanks for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me.
Warmly,
Lisa