Reimagine resilience

I have always liked Victor Havel’s declaration that hope is an orientation of the spirit.

For years, my blog’s tagline has been “Hopeful in spite of the facts,” and that is sort of what I’m getting at – hope isn’t dependent on facts, but on your orientation. And a key component of that orientation, for me anyway, is the decision, made in advance, that you will do all you can to make it to that day when the world as it is becomes the world as it ought to be. I cannot guarantee I will be there for it, but I want to deserve to be there.

And that requires resilience. And resilience is made up, more than anything else, of practices. 

There are different ways we humans connect with that which is more than us. Some people feel the infinite in music and song. Others know transcendence in their bodies. Some people respond to the holy in visual art, or aesthetics.

Me? I’m a word guy. I believe in the power of words to change the world. I recognize it is not the only way, but it is my way. When I was interviewed for my friend Kathy Escobar’s podcast last fall, I made a slide show of five different prose quotes that have shaped me and added to my resilience, and I shared the story behind them, and how I came to them.

I think about resilience, and things that overlap it, a lot. I have done so ever since the late 00’s, when I was on the edge of burnout and reached out to Bart Campolo, who would eventually become a sort of mentor to me, but at the time was just a name I knew from the internet. His advice, and friendship, would change my life as well as my career. Or perhaps those two changes are not inseparable.

Earlier this year, I did a recording for a (different) podcast that didn’t end up airing about resilience. In it. I talked about the practical side of physical resilience—things like having both electric and gas heating in my house, and several weeks worth of food in my pantry, and knowing who on my street is the cook or the nurse.

I find that physical resilience makes mental resilience easier to achieve. After all, like my hero and fellow Mississippian Fannie Lou Hammer said, if you have 400 quarts of soup put up in your pantry, nobody gets to tell you what to do. You sleep easier, knowing you have more options, more control, and more likelihood of weathering what storms may come.