Have you noticed how people are much more interested in finding ways to cope than they used to be? There seems to be a public acknowledgement that times are tough. As a culture, we all are more aware of the troubles of our “neighbors.” Part of this is the 24-hour news cycle which must be fed constantly, so there are more stories about the effects of the economic crisis, swine flu, etc. Part of it is that we are more in contact with people all over the country thru email, Skype, Facebook, etc, than we ever were before. We “know” more people and their stories.

At Book Club last night I heard about a family in Michigan. One of our Book Club members mentioned that she was talking to a software support person, someone she works with regularly. He told her that his wife and her family members (father, brothers, sisters) had ALL been laid off from one of the Big Three automakers. With only him still working, their family’s unemployment rate was about 80%.

These stories, whether personal or from the mass media, tug at our heartstrings and affect how we feel about the world, life in general and our own prospects. To keep going we need to find ways to cope, to hear about others and empathize but to still keep moving forward with what must be done. This is what resilience is all about.

The good news is resilience isn’t an inherited trait, at least not in the strictest sense of the word. They haven’t yet located it on a gene and you weren’t behind the door when God handed out resilience. Resilience is a skill that anyone can choose to learn and implement.

We define resilience as:

the strength, the optimism and the skills to endure, adapt and flourish in the face of adversity

Adversity is Not a Choice

There are several different levels of adversity.

There are the little annoyances which sometimes are the straws that break the camel’s back.

There are the medium sized problems which SHOULDN’T be that big a deal, but we still have to take the time to deal with them in order to continue in the direction we are going.

And finally, there are the big things – job loss, earthquake, illness, hurricane, etc. When it comes to the really big things, we don’t usually get a choice. We can’t stamp our feet and say, “HEY, I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR AN EARTHQUAKE TODAY!”

For me, Alzheimers was my first multi-year dance with a BIG adversity.

A few years ago, my brother, sister and I were trying to figure out what to do about our mother who had Alzheimers. Figuring out the right thing to do is a difficult process. What had gotten our attention was that Mom didn’t recognize Dad because she only remembered the younger version of him. She thought she was still a teenager and he was a dirty old man. One evening after coming back from dinner, she wouldn’t let him into the house and threatened him with a carving knife – after all she was protecting her honor.

Prior to this, we had been in the first stage of Alzheimers – denial. We were attempting to choose to ignore adversity. Now, Alzheimers was knocking us upside the head and saying, “PAY ATTENTION!”

If you accept the Alzheimers diagnosis (and for most of us this is a BIG IF), experts lay out a fairly clear set of choices for taking care of the patient. The problem is that not everyone accepts the diagnosis at the same rate. My father has never accepted it and my mother passed away almost four years ago. This meant that we had to negotiate between what Dad was willing to do and what was really best for him and Mom.

Often when we are under long-term stress, we have physical symptoms to go along with the psychological pain. In my case, I fell several times within about three months. None of the falls had serious consequences except that after the first fall I looked like I’d been beaten.

If we live long enough, we all face challenges like this. Some are big. Some are small but they feel big to us. What you find difficult, I may find easy and vice versa.

One Foot in Front of the Other

The role of resilience is to handle the “how” questions. It isn’t about the level of difficulty, it’s about how we handle the difficulty. Since life doesn’t stop when I hit a difficult patch, how do I keep going? Laundry still needs to get done, bills paid, family fed, animals walked, etc. At the end of the day, the only thing you may be able to be grateful for is that today is over and tomorrow is another day.

Resilience helps us to remember to be grateful for the little things. It helps us notice the stuff that helps: the dog always being happy to see you, the baby ducklings that make you smile, the jokes your friends send you on email (alright maybe you’re not grateful for some of those.) Resilience doesn’t guarantee that we’ll always feel good, it just helps us have the reserves to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Life doesn’t let us say, “Nope, don’t want to go on that ride. I don’t do… earthquakes, parents with dementia, children with learning disabilities, swine flu, economic crises, whatever.” My adopted father says that he’d much rather get cancer than Alzheimers. I hope he doesn’t get either, but then again, none of us gets to choose and we will all have to deal with whatever happens. Resilience is a set of skills that will help us to do that.

Adversity is Not Forever

Sometimes when we are in the middle of our troubles, it feels as if NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE. One of the purposes of practicing resilience is to remind ourselves that things have been better and they will get better again. Even in the Antarctic, the sun eventually comes out again. So the key is how we get thru to the better times, and that’s the focus of this blog.

How do we persevere during annoying times, during trying times, during those times when things are OK but you aren’t, during the times when “trouble comes in threes” and you can only handle ones? We’ll share stories of how we got thru, techniques for coping, some good books, and maybe even a clean joke or two. We’ll laugh, we’ll probably cry some, but in the end WE WILL BOUNCE BACK!