HEALTH & WELLBEING
Building resilience Story by Lori-Ellen Grant. Photograph by Jason Porter.
The word ‘resilient’ comes from the Latin resiliens meaning ‘to rebound, recoil’ and salire ‘to jump, leap.’ This etymology connotes movement, what I have come to define as ‘the act of bouncing back.’ But what does being resilient actually look like? How do we act? And where is the place for accepting what has happened – integration without denial – and moving forward? Experiences, both good and bad, can become imprinted on our senses, by a smell, a city, a song. Our memories are often triggered by these small things and can elicit the most pleasant of sensations, or painful reminders. It seems when a difficult experience is unresolved, then we relive the pain and shock over and over again. Yet when it is integrated into who we are, we have accepted it as part of the course of our life. My friend Angie passed away last year. She lived with her partner Greg on Kangaroo Island (KI) and was one of the most joyful people I think I’ve ever known. With an infectious laugh, she simply had a way about her. Her approach to life was creative, fun, simple and loved by our children. Straight away she’d be down on the floor with them drawing or setting them up on the rocking horse, showing them her latest shell collection or patting the dogs, Buddha and Bear. She had cancer, which had come and gone and she’d tried many things to heal. Yet in the end she was happy. In dying, she made many conscious choices about what to focus on and how she would spend her days. She was in pain, but in her way she quietly taught through example. Enjoying life can take a little or a lot of work; our minds need training, just like our muscles. And we can become what we think most about.
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It’s inevitable that, at some point in our lives, we will experience pain. It might be physical, emotional, psychological, existential. Crisis, trauma and shock can lead us to respond in different ways, as we have seen in the last few months with the bushfire crisis both nationally and locally in the Adelaide Hills and on KI. The devastation brought by the fires has galvanised the human spirit and spurred people to action, from the volunteer firefighters putting in hours at the front, to those coming along afterwards: building fences, planting trees, donating money, nursing wildlife or sewing marsupial pouches. Christchurch, Adelaide’s sister city, was my home for ten years and I was living there in 2011 when a major earthquake destroyed much of the city, killing almost two-hundred people. There were around 10,000 earthquakes the year following and much of the CBD was closed for six months, deemed too dangerous to enter. I found peoples’ response to this natural disaster overwhelmingly generous and creative in many ways. The intensity of the experience gave us the opportunity to tap into what was really important, what we truly valued and how we wanted to act. Human generosity was palpable. It was seen and felt and acted upon. People gave and people received and everyone felt better for it. Community was strengthened. Yes, there were looters and scammers. But there was also the opportunity to see the silver lining and each person could truly choose how they wanted to respond. At times of crisis one can often see that even though things aren’t good, it could be worse. Context can help to generate gratitude; we can be grateful for what we do have rather than focusing on what we don’t. This is not to make light of loss – loss of life, home, livelihoods, environment – more to acknowledge that at some point we must move on, we must choose to bounce back, to be resilient. And, we must take responsibility for what we focus on, making choices that take us in the direction that we want to go. Hopefully, to feel good again.
