Strength

It is a very relative term! Exclusively, strength means nothing, of course, in the sense of its tangible form usually. We usually seek strength in the form of number game. We garner opinion. We persuade grouping. Those who are comfortable with their laziness, try to form a ‘team’ for a job, which could have been easily handled alone, and then propagate the advantages of a team-spirit, unity is strength, etc. So, we humans are quite clever to even disrobe our ‘other’ weaknesses by according needless, or rather redundant credits to ‘strengths’. The consequence is that we get enmeshed into our own concepts of strength. That is when we start losing that mental strength! Political people have a better scope for this unique experience of that ‘strength’ slipping off all of a sudden. It takes them by utter surprise. All of a sudden everything turns against them(they play too much with the concept of ‘strength’! Even in the game of chess, we have that famous game “smothered mate” where all the ‘big’ powers actually end up preventing the main deciding piece, “the king”, from moving anywhere! So, the strength from external sources are not really a very good insurance.

Even about strength of knowledge and money is quite limited in crucial circumstances! A Sanskrit verse translates as “knowledge lying in books, and money lying in the hands of others are of little use during exigencies”. We lose information when data is stuck in an Hard disk which is inaccessible, and we are stuck out of money, when our ATM card gets stuck inside the ATM machine.

Psychiatrists would agree, when a patient is unable to think cohesively due to memory loss, only the ‘will’ or a strong ‘spirit’ is what they count on, for the ‘body’ of the patient to ‘respond’ to medicines!

During the training sessions for candidates selected for ‘coast-guard’, they stress the importance of that ‘will’ when they warn that the last few thoughts, during the crucial 15 minutes just prior to that numbness caused in brain, would decide whether they would swim to safety or drown to death in cold waters! (‘Hypothermia’ or something like that is the state, which disconnects our nervous system from carrying out the commands of the brain, but continues to do the ‘last known command’). Here too, the will of a person counts!

Then, what about the failures, which shatters all our ‘inner’ strengths? That was the question!

Psn(13th November, 2010)
http://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101110013832AAzcl3o
Is "Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger." a silly philosophy?
Whatever doesn't kill you may sever your spinal cord, crush your rib cage, cave in your skull, and leave you helpless and paralyzed soaking in a puddle of your own waste.And if you mean mentally strong, it could also break your spirit and leave you emotionally unstable.Anyone else think?

My answer:
Yes, it does sound 'silly' if we look at it just logically, bereft of the emotional content.
(And, emotions never obeyed logic!).
But, if we look at it a bit intuitively, it is the inner strength that this tries to indicate at. "We should not be 'stuck' at the pointing finger, or we would miss all that heavenly glory!" (quote adapted from the English movie "Enter the Dragon")....
This statement, "whatever doesn't kill me" means that whatever adversities that we face in life, especially those, for facing which we lack strength, would obviously make us fail, or perhaps, as the question says, sever our spinal cord, crush our rib cage, etc.... But, if we are alive, it simply means we outlived that 'bad' phase. It has failed to kill us. Now, we are enriched by the experience, and may be (... not just 'may be'... but, surely,...)our abilities have got reduced after that incident.
Now, if only we are willing to live on, the way we are now, there are several things we can do, we have time for them, which we never had for hither to, and with that strength and courage, we can achieve a still greater glory and make our life more meaningful, and perhaps, well remembered. (Please see, that Great Scientist Stephen Hawking, we have no scope to look at anything beyond his intellectual abilities, though our eyes can see his physical difficulty on the monitor/screen! His intellectual "strength" dwarfs most of us around him!)