A World of Ramblings

Monday, October 17, 2011

Importance of Resilience

So, just how important is resilience? I guess I should start by asking what is resilience?

Resilience is defined by the dictionary as follows:
noun
1.
the power or ability to return to the original form, position, etc., after being bent, compressed, or stretched; elasticity.
2.
ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like; buoyancy.

But we can hardly go back to an original position after the events we deal with in our lives, from daily to the special occasions. Especially the more challenging and depressive ones. Those also add a depth to our defining and shining moments, the hues always seems to be a little gray, a little blue with a little glory stolen from purple.


One can recover from illness perhaps more easily, but recovering from depression, adversity, challenges, or hitting the rock bottom for example, isn't all that easy and readily. In fact, I question people who can recover from adversities too quickly. Things that are quickly and easily solvable aren't adversities for that person's nature or endurance. We all have different endurance levels. What's easy for one may prove to be quite a challenge. We all have different stamina and the level of pain and sadness one can stand differs from past experiences, rearing and the nature one person adapts as a general philosophy in life. Most of us goes through similar milestones, with similar hardships at certain points in our time defined by our cultures. For example, as a six or a seven year old, we all go through the process of starting kindergarten, or first grade and go through a separation anxiety from or parents and or siblings. Then we grow older and meet bullies we must over come, each to her own, while some may suffer physical abuse, the other may suffer mental, while another's bully just might be herself. Then high school is a phase we're all too familiar with in 2011. We all have heard of teen angst and have been through it ourselves in one point or another. Most of us go through college admissions process and the undergraduate experience of living alone for the first time and learning to get by. Then comes serious relationships, marriages, kids, retirement and within those many similar milestones. While some experience divorce, infertility, lay offs, difficult of acquiring a job, a nonexistent love life, mid-life crisis, family problems, crisis of faith, loneliness, depression, apathy, over-sympathy....the list goes on. But each one of us are affected different by these events that occurs roughly throughout the modern world in the first world countries. It's the reaction we give to these events that separates us from the rest of the statistics, the bulk of humanity that gives us our voices and identities back as Jack, Jill, Joe, Jane and the rest.

So then, what is resilience? The question remains. It's the effort to not hit rock bottom, it's the ability to show the effort that you don't want to hit rock bottom and the ability to foster hope for a future where maybe you could create the opportunity for yourself to accomplish some of your most important goals, like getting a good education, fostering personal growth, acquiring a job, financially securing yourself and the other dreams that comes along with the individuals that we are. For me, it would be to have read all of the British, American, French, German, Russian, Turkish and Persian classics. Now, will I ever be able to achieve that? It's hard to tell at this point. I tell myself, I'm still young and will have many years to accomplish that list, at least partially. Will I ever have that time? Our time here is limited at best, and at worst we never know when we'll be leaving this place. So I might not have a long life and instead die tomorrow and all of this talk and thought could have been in vain; yet I still don't see this useless. It's all that much more important to have been left with impressions of the world and the mind and to have left your own impression on the world, on someone else, deeply enough to be remembered many years from today.


How important is it? I think it's very important not to give up and grow too content (I am an adamant fighter for contentment in our lives) with the settling we're doing in our lives, and growing accustomed to the way bad things are with no effort to fix them. It's hard to create habits, it's even harder to break those habits. It's important to establish a good routine to show resilience and to want more out of yourself, your life and to have the resilience to get through the difficulty in our individual lives for better tomorrows as eternity is always promises to those who believe in one form or another.

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