Resilience
Resilience in the physical world means the ability to return to an original form after bending and in the psychic realm means the ability to recover from adversity and continue with our lives. I read a magazine article that reminded me that resilience doesn't only apply to adversity but to good things as well. That is, we recover from good things as quickly as from bad. We generally return to normal surprisingly quickly following any major event, good or bad.
Interestingly, most people don't know how resilient they are. The article described various experiments to test expectations of resilience against actual resilience and predicted resilience was always lower than actual. The article concludes with a comparison of the present and the past: In the past, it was more likely that people would understand their own resilience.
It's important that we understand how quickly we heal from bad events because it helps us to bear them and because it permits us to be more active and venturesome in trying things that may improve our lives. If we believe that a bad result will be with us forever it will prevent us from taking risks to make things better and it will, ironically, make a bad result more difficult to overcome. If we assume a lengthy healing process, the healing process will be longer. If we know that time will heal our wounds, we will not be as wounded when adversity comes.
It's also important to understand that good things don't stay with us forever. We can't rest on our laurels when we experience good results from our efforts. We must understand that time will dull the effects of good things as well as bad and be prepared to move on, continue, indeed increase, our efforts and seek to improve our lives throughout our lives. In this way, we'll feel better, we will improve our lives and we'll help others as well.
Recognize that emotions are short-lived and look to the future to experience new emotions. Don't give up in the face of adversity or success: There's always more to do and we can always do more.
5-22-06
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