It may feel like what we are going through with the coronavirus has never happened before, and yet historically we are not the first to experience global pandemics.

The Antonine plague, The Spanish flu of 1918, the bubonic plague, the cholera pandemic, AIDS, SARS… there are many. And now Covid-19. In each of these cases we came back—with resilience.

In all studies on resilience, researchers have found that resilient people share three things in common that non-resilient people do not: (1) Resilient people see the world as a meaningful place; (2) Resilient people see themselves as having agency in that world; and (3) Resilient people see that successes and failures have been placed in their path to teach them something.

In these three excerpts, I explore these ideas in a talk hosted by the SOUL food Salon.