Thoughts on Resilience

Stoicism teaches that instead of thinking about the bad luck that has befallen us, we might better reflect on our capacity to survive and recover from it. Again, I think I got a head start on this with an ingrained attitude that “this, too, shall pass.”

Someone recently wrote to me that, although she was thankful for her home and her health, she had nothing in front of her to move toward, that she was just breathing. Perhaps we sometimes set the bar too high for ourselves. There are millions of people who would move heaven and earth for health and a place to call home.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl writes “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” If I were to attempt to come up with a summary for resilience it would have to do with regarding any untenable situation from the perspective of moving forward past it. I don’t know if that even makes sense, but I don’t see giving up as a viable option.

When I assess an area’s resilience to recover from a disaster there are things we traditionally look at such as the population’s education, competence in English, income earners per household, adults per household with children. It occurs to me that none of those criteria are deal breakers. A disadvantaged condition may delay community recovery but recovery remains possible if there’s the will.
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A friend of mine was and still is stuck in a job that pays her bills but gives her no joy. She has an unrealized dream to become a pastry chef  but every time the subject comes up in conversation it has consisted of reasons why she can’t do it. She’s right. There will always be a thousand reasons why something might not work, and if that’s our focus no way forward is likely to ever be found.

Stoicism teaches us to differentiate between elements over which we have a level of control and elements that are not ours to control, and to concentrate our efforts on those aspects of our lives that are ours to control. As in the Serenity Prayer, there are things we cannot change but plenty of things that we can change, and one of the most important of those is our capacity to change. There’s a word for that; I think it’s resilience.

 

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