resilience

Living the Questions

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

–Ranier Maria Rile

Letters to a Young Poet

 

Be patient toward all that is unsolved within your heart. Yeah, right.

Because patience is something we are all busy cultivating, in this culture of instant gratification. Because patience is something we humans are so good at right from the start – ever been around a young child who wants something? Yes, patience is a virtue we only possess if we actively seek and practice it, because we are not (most of us) born patient.

Lacking patience, how does one live within the questions long enough for the inner self to discern, then make known, the answers? It is not easy. Have you ever had an itch that would not go away, despite extreme bodily contortions to reach and scratch it? Living with the internal itchiness of unresolved questions can be truly uncomfortable. I’ve been given the advice to trust my gut, which is fine if your gut is a trustworthy ally. Mine tends to be a trickster, responding from fear but pretending otherwise. (And then prompting me to eat because food will make me feel better.)

Rilke’s suggestion that, gradually, without realizing it, we might live into the answers someday isn’t particularly comforting. I mean, how are we supposed to move forward without answers?  Steve Jobs, in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford, uses the image of connecting the dots. That each decision, each step we take, is a dot. He goes on to say that the dots cannot ever be connected moving forward, they can only be connected looking backward, in retrospect. We have to keep choosing and trust that the dots will connect.

My tricksy gut tells me he’s right. Cultivate the patience to wait for the answers to make themselves known, while trusting that the choices I make in the meantime will connect in a coherent way someday. Remaining where I am because I am afraid to move forward without all the answers, may seem safe. But the truth is, I’m just stuck. To get unstuck, I need to cultivate my inner Wile E. Coyote (from the Roadrunner cartoons). I need to be willing to keep moving forward right off the edge of the canyon into the unknown. Now, Wile E. always looks down, and in doing so loses his faith that he can make it to the other side, causing him to plummet to the canyon floor. That’s where the trust part comes in: take a step and keep going, trusting that I’ll get to the next dot. Because I will. Even when Wile E. Coyote falls, he gets back up and tries again in the next episode.

 

Next Generation

Today, I spent two hours interviewing high school seniors who were competing for top scholarships at the university I work for. Prior to meeting them, I had a chance to review lists of the activities in which they have been involved throughout the four years of high school. Each young person’s list was more than a page in length, meaning that the activities for each numbered in the high teens through the twenties. Band, sports, community service, church-sponsored activities, peer mentoring. The lists were impressive.

However, when asked to tell us about an issue in her community or the world about which she felt passionate, one student told us that she is concerned about how stressed high school students are these days. They have pressures from family, from friends, from teachers, the community and the colleges competing for their enrollment. She felt that more attention should be given to helping students develop a sense of self-worth and self-determination, rather than so much effort expended in making them marketable.

According to the National Survey of Freshmen, the entering college class of 2010 is the least emotionally healthy class ever. And for the first time, anxiety has overtaken depression as the leading mental health issue reported by students.

Taken together, the student’s words and the survey results give me pause to reconsider the activity lists submitted to us. Were they impressive? Or an example of our society’s desire to put form ahead of substance?

These days, students arrive on the steps of our institutions of higher learning carrying some pretty heavy baggage (both literally and figuratively). They come with plenty of self-focus but very little self-knowledge; having dabbled in many things, often without developing true passion for any one activity; expecting to face difficulties, but with very little resilience when problems arise. Perhaps the root of this is the very idea that our role as the adults in their world is to help them see themselves as a commodity to be groomed for the market – whether that is the college scholarship market or the job market.

Working with college students has been both my career and my vocation. I am not afraid that today’s young people are any more likely to screw up the world than previous generations. I am, however, very concerned that we are likely to screw them up in lasting ways. I recently listened to a TED lecture by Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! in which he talks about the absurdity of three year olds being interviewed for pre-school. He goes on to make a case for a revolution in education, as opposed to reform. I believe that if such a revolution is to occur, there will need to be a concurrent revolution in the way parents and communities talk about and model what it means to be a mature human being. Otherwise, our adolescents will continue to be stressed, and we will never move beyond this Age of Anxiety in which we are living.

When the Pendulum Swings

When I was younger, in high school and college, I was very deeply involved in religious activities. Several times a year, I went on weekend retreats, which were invariably peak experiences. People who hardly knew one another would open the contents of their hearts, bond quickly and intensely, and share a high well beyond any experienced in normal, daily life. Returning to normalcy post-retreat was always difficult. People returned to their daily selves, and the shared experience grew less powerful as a touchpoint with one another. As the retreat ended, you told yourself things had changed, that you had changed. But the truth was, your old self and habits nearly always reasserted themselves.

I remember Pastor Ross addressing this: faith isn’t a feeling, he said. When the feeling of the retreat passes, you discover that faith is a verb. Something you actively do, not something you passively feel.

It has now been many years since I’ve been on that kind of retreat, or experienced exactly that kind of high. However, for just over a year now, I have been on a journey which has led to similar feelings: happiness, joy, a sense of purpose, renewed (or just new) relationships. My life has had a quality of incipience, every day on the cusp of a new experience or revelation. It has been amazing. I have gushed about it. I have sworn that everything is different now, things have changed, I have changed.

And all of that is true. However, no peak experience, no emotional high lasts forever. And when that feeling goes away, when the pendulum begins to swing on the downward arc, what does one do? More to the point, what should I do?

Option #1: Chase the High

A friend recently invited me to join her at a movie premiere in New York. The movie, directed by Robert Redford, stars several actors I enjoy. I loved that she asked, but for a variety of reasons needed to decline the offer. Several people told me I was crazy; in fact, one person said she wished she had my life because she would live it better than me. Well, that’s possible, I suppose. However, I am still me. I will still make decisions, for good or ill, based on my own values and gut feelings. I will never be the type of person who drops everything else in my life to jump at unusual experiences just to be able to say, “See what I did?!” So, chasing the high isn’t really an option suited to my temperament.

Option #2: Wallow.

As the pendulum drops from its apex, its easy to allow your emotional self to plummet into sadness and depression. Truthfully, there have been many times when this proved to be my modus operandi. In the current case, the things that have changed the most in my life are internal. The outward trappings have remained essentially the same. And now I am faced with the same life choices and decisions that have always awaited my attention: What should I be doing with my life? I have learned to be honest with myself, which felt really good at first, but which can be a bit depressing. For example, I pretended for decades that I didn’t have feelings like other people. Now, I’ve admitted to myself that I do and some of them are angry or disappointed or sad. Part of me wants to roll around in those denied emotions for a while, just feeling them. Luckily, my emotional health is more robust than it once was, and I can’t see the point in wallowing. So, Option #2 is a no go.

Option #3: Remember that to BE has always been a verb.

I’ve (briefly) studied two foreign languages in my life, and while I don’t remember much of either, I do remember that to be was the first verb we learned to conjugate in both of them.  So this option suggests that, regardless of what I am feeling, I can keep breathing, keep moving forward. I can keep living in the present, living as this new self I’ve worked so hard to become. And I can have faith – an active choice, not just a momentary feeling – in my ability to continue creating a meaningful life.

In summary: Option 1: too hard; Option 2: too soft.  Option 3…just right! Now that I’ve chosen an attitude, I just have to figure out the right action plan to go with it. And that will be both the hard and the rewarding part. I don’t know what will come next. But I do know that the pendulum will eventually hit its nadir and begin another upward climb!

Let’s Call It “Experience”

“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”

— Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

When I was a kid, I wanted an Easy Bake Oven.  Think about it: a toy in which a lightbulb provides the heat source to bake all kinds of delectable confections and a kid obsessed with delicious goodies.  Why wouldn’t the two be destined for one another?  But, I never got one.  Turns out, I wasn’t alone in my disappointment.  The other day I was talking with friends, and someone said, in the stilted tones of a disgruntled 10-year-old,  “I never got one either. My mom thought they were stupid.”  My own mother’s sentiments exactly.

The Christmas orgy of gift-giving affords many opportunities to think about what to do, or what it means, when you don’t get what you want.  Disappointment in the gifts received is only the tip of that iceberg.  We hang so many hopes and expectations on the holiday — we want someone to stick a bow on us and say, “You’re my present this year” like in the coffee commercial.  We want that moment when we are completely aware that our life is rich and full of meaning (resulting in our buddy Clarence getting his wings).  We want to sing in four-part harmony about the white Christmas of our dreams while wearing gorgeous red-velvet dresses…ok, maybe that one is just me!  You get the picture, though.

I, personally, have been lucky in two ways.  First, growing up in a family with six children and a limited income, I had many opportunities to learn that I might not get everything I wanted.  I learned many coping mechanisms for this, from swallowing my disappointment with a 2000 calorie chaser of fudge to learning to be happy with what I did have.  Admittedly, some mechanisms were more helpful than others.

The second way in which I have been lucky is that, in the past year or so, I’ve gotten more than I ever expected on so many levels. I won a cruise, for crying out loud, not to mention healing relationships and recovering self-esteem along with some pretty amazing bike rides.  And I’ve been learning healthier coping mechanisms too.

Which, it turns out I’ve needed recently.  I got so accustomed to getting whatever it seemed I wanted, that I started to forget that life doesn’t work that way 100% of the time.  And BLAM! I ran smack up against it: not getting something I really wanted. Had this been something material, like an iPhone or a Nook, I think I would have taken it in stride.  But in the realm of emotional desires, I’ve discovered it can be much harder to find a way to manage extreme disappointment.  Here’s how I’m proceeding:

1.  I remind myself of the Randy Pausch quote, above.  Experience, as he refers to it, is just another name for living life as fully as possible.  And that is, deep down, what I truly want.

2.  I remind myself to be grateful for all I do have.  The list is long, and astounds me when I really think about it.

3.  I surround myself with people who make me laugh, to balance the private moments when, sometimes, I cry.

4.  I take action in other aspects of my life in order to feel positive momentum:  craft room clean, check; menu planned for the week, check; Tupperware organized, check. (If you know me, you’d better be laughing at this last one – when have I EVER been the kind of person who has orderly Tupperware?)

In these ways, even the awful feeling of not getting your heart’s desire can be transformed. Not what you expected, but not at all shabby.  And you’re able to remember that gifts come in their own time.  I believe that hope and patience are excellent qualities to cultivate because they contribute to resilience in the face of disappointment. And because, despite what you feel today, you can never know what the future holds.

Which brings me back to the Easy Bake Oven.  I received a Christmas gift on which there was a tag which read, “From Santa:  Sorry!  I’m a few years late with this. ENJOY!”  I’m sure you know what was waiting under the wrapping paper. Sometimes, if not always, you do get the things you want. Maybe in a slightly delayed time frame, or from a source you never anticipated.  Being ready for either outcome is, perhaps, what experience is meant to teach us.

Wherever I go, there I am!

One day last week (like Alexander in the children’s book by Judith Viorst),  I was having a terrible, horrible, very bad, no good day I updated my Facebook status to say, “I don’t mean to be a whiner, but today totally bites.”  That evening, I had a voicemail from one of my oldest friends.  She said, “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I was so happy to see your Facebook status!  You’ve been so chipper for so long, I was beginning to wonder who you were, and what you did with my friend!”  Was there any way to take that message other than to laugh and admit she had a point?

Dear readers, I have often shared that my life has changed materially in the time since I began this blog.  It is true, I am happy for probably the first time in my adult life.  The kind of happy that penetrates deep below the surface of daily ups and downs.  The type of happy that prevents me from writing depressing status updates or complaining incessantly about minutiae.  I am “big picture” happy — and that is a really great place to be.

If you don’t know me, or if, like my relieved friend above, you stay up-to-date through electronic means and infrequent chats, you might not be getting an accurate picture of how my newly happy self interacts with the world.  Those who see me daily were less surprised, I am sure, to read my complaint!  Being happy doesn’t mean I have stopped expressing emotional ups AND downs, or that I have magically overcome all hurdles in my emotional, physical, or professional life.  Far from it.

Example #1:  I am able to go for relatively lengthy periods of time having what I would call a “right relationship” with food.  I eat and truly enjoy fresh, healthy food prepared by my own hands.  In fact, this begins to feel so right and so normal for me, that I start to believe that I have conquered the old “wrong relationship” of using food to feed my emotional needs — I mean, anyone can overcome an ingrained, lifelong coping mechanism, right?  And then a really difficult hurdle pops up and I find myself eating my way through a Thursday night and most of a Friday.

Example #2: Negative self-talk is something most of us have experience with.  I have sometimes taken it to the extreme of hatefully loathing self-talk.  (If I heard someone say to another person the things I’ve said to myself, I would be unable to refrain from physical violence.)  Even on good days, I sometimes catch sight of myself in a mirror and that voice in my head starts in:  “You think you look good?  Who are you kidding?  No wonder you’re alone. Look at you, who would ever be attracted to that?”

Example #3: When I have a bad day at work, I am tempted just like everyone else is, to rail against the other people who are clearly, patently, responsible for my bad day. Some days I totally give in to that temptation, and suddenly the number of miserable people multiplies exponentially. Who doesn’t start to feel worse when they spend time with Debbie Downer?

But the big difference about these situations now, what causes me to seem so changed to my old friends —  none of those things defines me, nor do they set my agenda for days and weeks to come.  Fell off the food wagon?  I’m no easily bruised peach, and I’m certainly able to catch up to the wagon and jump back on!  Talking smack at myself?  It may not always be easy, but I tell that biach to shut up if she doesn’t have anything constructive to offer.  Having a bad day at the office?  Get in line! Or better yet, stop complaining and find something productive to do.  I really have learned to stop my negative spirals and bring my spirit and mood back up to even keel.  Some days I can do that immediately, others it takes longer.  But I do get there, and that is the biggest gift happiness brings to my life.

So, to all my friends who have wondered where the real me went, SURPRISE! She’s still here.  She’s just the new and improved version: more resilient, more self-confident, less cranky…most, but not all, of the time.

Resilience

I had planned to write a humorous post this week, but that will have to wait.  What I find myself thinking obsessively about today is resilience.  “An ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change” (thank you Webster’s) is quite a profound grace.

When adversity strikes, it is tempting to wallow.  I mean, who hasn’t wanted to spend days – if not weeks – in the slough of despond crying “Woe is me”?  I know it doesn’t sound like something you would do voluntarily, except that when life falls apart around you it is suddenly a pretty appealing option.  Compared with the alternatives, like bearing it with good will and a sense of humor, self-pity seems incredibly seductive.

But as Samuel Johnson said, “Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.”  If this is true, then using the moments of our biggest hurdles to learn our own capacities can be an opportunity for deep growth.  But how do we develop this kind of resilience?  Are we born with it, or do we discover it within ourselves when we exercise the only real power we have in these moments — the power to choose our own reaction?

In “Man’s Search for Meaning”, Viktor Frankl wrote powerfully about this power of choice.  In his case, the crucible for discovering his own capabilities was life in Nazi prison camps.  For most of us, the adverse conditions in which we find ourselves do not compare with Auschwitz.  They are more likely illness or injury, burnout, stress, chronic financial strain, cars breaking down when we can least afford them to.  I don’t mean to minimize the pain of these experiences, only to point out their less than epic nature.  We think we might rise to the occasion in an epic struggle.  But what about simple, daily, hurdles which drain our pocketbooks and/or leach our positive energy?

I’ve come to believe that resilience can be cultivated.  I’ve watched my friend Dave build it in his daughters by telling them daily, “Is this how you want to feel?  If not, then choose something else.”  And those girls are able to redirect their emotional energy – the first step is learning that it is possible to do so.  (In fact, Dave has given me the same lecture time and again, with good, if mixed, results. Like a second language, children learn this more quickly than adults.)  Sometimes, you cultivate your capacity to bounce back by pretending.  During resident assistant training every year, I tell my student staff that they need to project calm in emergency situations — they don’t have to actually feel calm, just act that way.  The secret hidden in this advice is that projecting calm often leads to mastering your feelings of panic.  Projection won’t take you all the way, but it can help to jump-start movement in a positive direction.

The other day my friend Melissa was feeling burned out.  She found that focusing on something she could control, rather than focusing on her burnout, made the difference. She told me, “I’m glad to see I’m pretty resilient these days… a 4.5 mile jog and a swim at the beach helped me bounce back.”  Another friend, facing yet another financial setback, worked to get his thinking aligned in order to flow with the current rather than get caught in the riptide of self-pity. His mantra was, “I’m fluid, I’m fluid, I’m fluid”.

Important in both of my friends’ abilities to face these difficult moments was choosing to bounce with resilience rather than splat with despair.  This kind of choosing may look relatively simple from the outside, but superficial or platitudinous thinking won’t actually cut it.  We have to want it, more than we want to win the “I have the worst life” story contest we carry on inside our heads (come on, that’s not just me, is it?!).  And wanting it, we have to also choose it, consciously, in each moment.  So, today, I pledge to cultivate resilience in myself — and to support those I love in finding the inner resources to choose it themselves.  Let’s go for the bounce, people!

Hear Us Roar!

Saturday night in July, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  My friends Molly and Sarah and I sitting in section F, halfway up.  The ice arena floor, bare cement with huge florescent pink ovals taped to it.  Women in skimpy clothes, bearing names like Krash, Toxic Angel, and (my personal favorite) Amelia No-Heart, roller skating in circles occasionally elbowing or pushing another skater to the floor.  Yep, the Cedar Rapids Pink Ladies Roller Derby was in town.

At first, we had no idea what was happening on the floor.  But we eventually caught on, and enjoyed learning the strategy and seeing the display of sheer chutzpa.  Molly hoped for harder hits, while Sarah thought about what her Roller Derby moniker might be:  Sarah Lee POUNDcake or Sarah Lee CupCRUSHER?  I was in awe — these women were displaying part athleticism, part showmanship.  And all of them were just putting themselves completely out there.  All body types, no holding back.  (OK, maybe a little holding back — it was an exhibition and they were competing against their own teammates).

In the spirit of the roller girls, I want to talk about power and strength.  Mental and emotional toughness.  Whether and how any of those concepts apply to me!

A Roller Derby Newbie’s Guide to Girl Power

  • Don’t be afraid to let them see you sweat. Its true, powerful women sweat, sometimes profusely.  After riding my bike just over 24 miles the other night, I had a crust of dried salt crystals on my forehead.  Every thread of my clothes was soaked.  My hair was a frightening combination of styles:  Moe from the 3 Stooges (on top where my helmet plastered it to my head) and Medusa (out of control curls with a life of their own where the breeze could reach it).  From now on, I will wear the Moe-dusa proudly.
  • Your body is what it is. Revel in it anyway.  When I mentioned that the roller girls were every body type, I meant it — and every type was dressed in tight, skimpy clothing.  They were an inspiration to me as I struggle with the vicissitudes of significant weight loss.  I don’t know how heavy I was at my heaviest, but the highest reading I saw on a scale was 352 pounds.  The effects on my body of that excess are visible, and I can obsess about them…or not.  Every day I need to choose; and I intend to choose a roller girl attitude!
  • If you want it, fight for it. Ok, this is one that the roller derby expresses in a very physical manner.  They push and elbow and trip and generally knock each other around.  In my life, this is more likely to be expressed in fighting for the discipline, the planning, the effort to achieve the goals I want to reach.  Creating a life that is happy and satisfying can be a joyful endeavor at the soul-level, but it is also hard work.
  • When you get knocked down, pick yourself back up. Notice, I didn’t say “if you get knocked down”.  Because you will, we all do.  People let us down, we let ourselves down, the economy tanks, forces beyond our control refuse to do what we prefer.  I can lay on the ground like a bug flipped on its back, flailing my arms and crying “woe is me”  (and Lord knows I have).  But I don’t want to waste any more time on that.
  • If it hurts, skate it off. I watched several women hit the floor in ways that looked incredibly painful.  There were a few pileups as well.  Each time, they stood up, skated around testing out their limbs, then went back to the game.  I’ve been practicing this physically with my knees — I’ve decided that living an active life means that sometimes my body hurts.  Emotionally, I’ve been practicing this too.  After holding on to hurts or insecurities for years, I’m working on letting them go.  Sometimes, this takes the form of forgiveness and reconciliation, others it is more simply choosing not to invest energy there anymore.  I choose healing over festering.

I’m sure there are other items I could add to the guide above.  I must say, I am looking forward to seeing an actual competitive match.  One other thing about attending the roller derby:  it reminded me how much I’ve always loved to skate.  Anyone care to join me at the local rink for the free skate?