Building Your Resiliency Muscle
When I was sixteen years old, and my father was 48, he died of a heart attack. We were playing tennis at the time when without warning he suffered a massive coronary and died in my arms. I remember many things about that day, but one memory that stands clear, was after my mom showed up at the hospital and the doctor came out to pronounce him dead, she turned to me and said, “You’re the man of the house now.” I remember as if it were yesterday distinctly thinking, “Holy crap. I’m only sixteen years old for god’s sake. I am not ready for this!” She was so traumatized it was clear she couldn’t handle telling my three younger siblings, and so, without a driver’s license and barely knowing how to drive, I took the family station wagon fifteen miles back to our home and on the front lawn, with screaming and crying children and neighbors, broke the news to my fourteen and ten year old sisters and six year old brother. It was…awful. At 64, that moment and the trauma it represented, still stands as one of the most critical defining moments in my life. One, that for worse, and yes better, has shaped who I am today.
But here’s the thing. I am not alone in my grief or struggle. Some had it better than me in their childhoods, and some much much worse. Same as it is today. It is what makes us human. What also makes us human is our capacity to rise above and to choose our response. This choice, whether conscious or not, has a word. It is…“resilience”.
It may feel like what we are going through 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.
The word comes from Latin resiliens—the root of which means to “rebound”, to “jump” or to “leap”. Maybe the most interesting way of thinking about resilience is that it’s root can also be found in the Latin phrase for “starting point”. This implies that our true character is measured not in anything we initially do, but in how we respond, when we are tested.
In all studies on resilience, researchers have found that resilient people share three things in common that non-resilient people do not.
Resilient people see the world as a meaningful place;
Resilient people see themselves as having agency in that world;
Resilient people see that successes and failures have been placed in their path to teach them something.
Let’s look a little more closely at these foundational ideas.
Image from NASA
First, the world is a meaningful place.
Einstein said it well. “There are only two ways to look at the universe. Either as nothing is a miracle or everything is a miracle”.
I can’t answer the larger theological question for you, but I can say if you want to build your resiliency muscle, then keeping your eyes and mind open to the possibility of meaning in this time, is step number one.
When researchers and clinicians look at who copes well in crisis and even grows through it, it’s not those who focus on pursuing happiness to feel better; it’s those who cultivate instead an attitude of what is called, “tragic optimism”.
Tragic optimism is a phrase originated by Victor Frankl, who wrote the landmark book Man’s Search for Meaning, about his experiences in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. It means the ability to maintain hope and find meaning in life despite its inescapable pain, loss and suffering.
He studied survivors and those that perished—and found that the survivors shared one thing in common—they never obsessively focused on comfort, or happiness, or even survival. They endlessly looked for the meaning in whatever their day brought them. No matter what horror or unimaginable sadness, they kept asking:
Where is the meaning in this?
What am I to gain from this?
How can I be my very best during the very worst?
After 9/11 studies of subjects who were more resilient found that they sought meaning in what had happened.
This did not mean however that they were Pollyannas. While perception is reality, reality is also reality. They fully understood the tragedy we were all experiencing. They had the same levels of sadness and stress as less resilient people. We see this in the research over and over. Resilient people feel intensely negative reactions to trauma. They experience the darkest of emotions, including stress, despair and fear. And yet? They stay present with the pain. They hold the experience.
But, and this is critical…it is not where they stop, because then they actively seek hope and light, and this buoys them.
When I was 42 I too almost died of a heart related issue. I was in Lima, Peru and about to fly to Cuzco, a city at 15,000 feet above sea level and hike into Machu Pichu. While in the National Museum, for some unknown reason, at sea level, I suffered major angina. I collapsed and was flown back to the United States where I underwent quintuple bypass surgery. I had seven major blockages, two of them over 90%. I was literally a day away from dead and didn’t know it. Research tells us that heart attack survivors who find meaning in the weeks and months following their crisis were eight years later healthier and more likely to be alive than those who didn’t. For me it’s 22 years out and I haven’t had any symptoms return.
I look back on that time, which was the impetus to go and get a degree in divinity, write a one man play about my experience, and most important dramatically change my lifestyle, as one of grace and deep meaning. Like my father’s death, it profoundly shaped me for the better and who I am today.
How did this happen?
My secret during recovery, and opposite to many heart patients who can suffer deep depression after surgery, was not to ask, “Why did this happen to me?’ My secret was to continually ask, “Why did this happen for me?”
Holding an attitude of “tragic optimism”, can bounce us forward and we can grow not despite the pain, but because and through it. It’s not the trauma that creates the growth. It’s the response.
Step two to building your resiliency muscle.
Resilient people see themselves as having some agency in the world. In this regard, they consciously or unconsciously focus on what they can control.
If I have an apple in my hand and I drop it, it falls and hits the ground. Why? Not a trick question. Think what your answer would be—why did the apple fall and hit the ground?
Answer one…gravity.
Answer two...I dropped it.
Everything that will come to you today, tomorrow and in your future will be in one of two categories. The things you can’t control—gravity. And the things you can control—you dropped it. Resilient people naturally move away from the first and towards the second. They seek actions within their grasp, and away from those things they ultimately have no agency.
I love a practice of the Inuit peoples of the arctic, a place I spent much time years ago. If you approached an Inuit elder and complained about something in your life, he or she would listen very carefully the first time. If you complained again about the same thing, he or she would listen very carefully the second time. If you complained a third time, he or she would again listen very empathetically, maybe as if they were hearing it for the very first time. But if you complained about the same issue a fourth time, they would silently stand up and walk away, because at that point they believed you were more committed to your problem than you were to finding a creative solution.
It was a reminder, don’t blame gravity—instead focus on your hands.
Years ago, after the war in Bosnia, I worked with a remarkable woman named Seida Saric, who was the country director for a terrific organization called Women for Women International. One day, as she was giving me a tour of Sarajevo, with powerful commentary like, “Here is where my cousin was shot by a sniper” and “Here is where a mortar fell and almost killed me”, I asked, “Seida, what was the war like for you?” “Oh David”, she quietly said. “It was so very hard. The fear, the starvation, the constant struggle, the death.” Then she looked away, smiled a wicked smile and said, “But…I do miss the parties!” In the worst of the worst, Seida and her community decided to choose life.
The third and final step to building resiliency is to welcome all that comes to your gate, good and bad as being a teacher.
This is what is meant by the Buddhist phrase, “The obstacle is the path”. It is more than just dealing with struggle. It is welcoming it.
I’m not saying we enjoy it. It sometimes can suck. Right now, as my military friends would say, we are in the “Big Suck.” Maybe the biggest suck of our modern history. Finding the learnings can be painful and hard. But it is…the path.
A helpful tool can be found in this story…a story so famous you will know the punch line as soon as I tell you.
It has to do with a king, who suffered mightily from a roller coaster of emotion. One day he’d be up and happy, enjoying the bounty of his life. The next day, he’d be down, sad at the overwhelm of it all. When he could take it no longer, he called for his wise man, i.e. life coach, to help him manage his life. After listening carefully, his wise man reached into his pocket and pulled out a small but beautifully carved box of rare wood, inlaid with mother of pearl and rare and precious jewels. “Do not look at the outside”, he said. “That is just wrapping paper. Inside the box is your answer”. When the king opened the box, he found a simple gold ring, strangely simple because of the container that held it. But on that ring was carved the following phrase. A phrase every one of you knows, a phrase your grandmother probably taught you as a child, as did mine. On that ring was one short sentence, “This too shall pass”.
The secret to building the third step is to remember, that no matter what, when things are awful, and yes they have been and will continue to be awful for a while—the trajectory of your life, no matter what, no matter how hard, no matter how tragic and no matter what struggles await, whatever it is—it too shall pass.
In my work I have heard the worst stories you could imagine. Rape, death of a child, financial collapse, addictions of all sorts, cancer, deep suicidal depressions. But in all those stories what is true is that the people I have worked with got to the other side. It is the great mystery of the human mind that life’s lessons are usually only learned in the rear-view mirror and rarely through the front windshield. And yet? Here we are. Still.
As a Buddhist friend of mine says, “If you are alive, then no problem. If dead. Then definitely no problem!”
But that is only half of the message. Because “This too shall pass” is also a reminder that on your good days, when things look bright and you have hope and beauty in your day, cherish it. Say your gratitude’s. Stop and watch a cloud pass. See the beauty and kindness that is available to you and probably there if you choose to look. Because it is the nature of life that this too is temporary—this too shall pass.
We can make the bad days go faster and the good ones seem longer, by remembering to wake every morning and to metaphorically put on our rings…and reminding ourselves that the message of “This too shall pass”, is only a choice away. I remember my mom, when she was 85 and with Alzheimer’s telling me in a cogent moment, that after my father died and left her alone with four small children and terrified, she starred in the mirror, and said to herself, “You can do this. You know how to do this. Your kids are depending on you. Now, do this!” And she did, rising to spectacular levels of success in the State Court System of Pennsylvania.
This attitude is captured beautifully in a favorite poem by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who wrote Women Who Run with the Wolves.
Refuse to fall down.
And if you cannot refuse to fall down, then refuse to stay down.
And if you cannot refuse to stay down, then lift your heart to the heavens like a hungry beggar, and ask that it be filled and it will be filled.
You can be pushed down.
You can be kept from rising.
But nobody can keep you from lifting your heart to the heavens,
except you.
In the middle of misery, much becomes clear.
Those who say, nothing good can come of this,
are not yet listening.
Emily Smith, who authored, The Power of Meaning, says, “Life is, as Buddhists say, 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. As much as we might wish, none of us can avoid suffering. That’s why it’s important to learn to suffer well”.
Personally, I love the teaching from my own Jewish tradition. It says in the Talmud, that each person should always carry two pieces of paper in his or her pocket. On one slip of paper it should say, “The universe was created just for me”. On the other, “I am nothing but dust and ash”. The secret to life? Know when to read which piece of paper.
To view the video version of this presentation, as hosted by SOUL Food Salon, please click here.