Tag: resilience

The roses persist, and so do I.

I’ve been struggling with low-level depression for most of this year. Just doing the bare minimum of self-care has been a struggle. It’s effect on me has been exacerbated by a big cut in income I have experienced this year, and the loss of health insurance which prevents me from having access to mental health meds.

Also, it is so, so hot here. I haven’t built anything in my workshop in over a month, because it is in the 90’s in my workshop all the time. I haven’t been on one of my long walks in over a month because of the heat. This is circular, because one of the most effective ways for me to stave off the effects of depression is to go for long walks in nature (walking in the suburban mall doesn’t work the same way – I’ve tried).  

The big cut in income brings its own problems, of course, but the depression means you just do not have the energy to do the things you need to do to deal. I learned last week that one of my contracts is being cut in half. I don’t have the energy to freak out, but my brain really wants to. My car needs some expensive brake work, so I’ve parked it until I find some money, and instead am driving my very reliable 25 year old work truck, which is amazing except the air conditioning does not really work (have I mentioned how hot it is here?). I have no energy to work on any of this.

Everything is made harder when you are depressed.

Meanwhile, my antique roses are doing great.

Antique roses are those introduced to market before the introduction of hybrid tea roses in 1867. Antique roses tend to be bulletproof, because they were popular before disease fighting spraying regimes were really a thing. Back then, roses that couldn’t fight off disease just died.

I have a bunch of roses in my yard. Most of them are antiques. And right now it’s 98.8 degrees outside, with a heat index of 110, and my roses are just blooming up a storm. In August, in the middle of Mississippi.

I guess roses don’t get depressed.

Actually, the heat does stress them, but they keep going. They are resilient in the face of stress, not immune to it.

Talk about goals.

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.

The myth of inevitable progress

Our species has been on the earth for more than 200,000 years. 30,000 years ago, there was a sort of explosion of art and cave paintings showing up on multiple regions and continents. 12,000 years ago we began to build settlements and plant crops. We have a long and vigorous history as a species.  But much of what we expect life to be like is based on less than 100 years of our history.

Like the idea that you can retire. Or that you will make more money as you get older. Or that children will not work to support the family. That you will have access to clean water to drink. That you will be in love with the person you marry. That home ownership is normal and expected. That working for someone else for pay is normal and expected. And my favorite: That p is inevitable.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, however. After all, my grandfather was born in 1886. His son died in 2020. Two lives, during which time we went from horse and buggy to railroad to airplanes to visiting the moon to exploring Mars. My grandfather grew up in an age where a rusty nail could kill you, and in his 30’s would live through a global flu pandemic that killed millions. By the time his son was born, there were antibiotics and then polio took out most of a generation and then there was a vaccine and nobody died from polio and rarely did they die from the flu.

If all you knew of human history was the last 150 years, you would be convinced progress was inevitable. That over the long term, optimism is the only realism. That you should always be bullish.

But history tells us otherwise.

I love to grow things, and there are natural rhythms that occur you can depend on that guide our world. Like the last frost date in the springtime, the day on which your danger of freezing is gone and thus you can put out your tomatoes. But in 1815, there was a volcanic eruption in Bali that led to global climate impacts that lasted more than a year, including frost in Virginia in August. People starved, there was massive upheaval, and Mary Shelly was driven indoors and wrote Frankenstein as a result.

Life is not ordered – it is chaotic. Sometimes, the stings of good runs last a long time – but they are still strings, and not chains. And if you think that every day in the future will be like all the days you have had before, you will be OK… until you aren’t, and then you may be wiped out.

I no longer believe in the inevitability of progress, even if our economy is predicated on it. But nothing grows forever – things get sick and sometimes things die, and eventually, everything does.

Don’t mishear me: I’m not advocating for a survival bunker in the basement full of guns and body armor. But I do think it make sense to include in your plans the probability that things will not go according to plan.

Another time, I will talk about what I think a healthy amount of preparation looks like at the household level. But more important than any individual thing you do is, I think, the mindset with which you approach it. I don’t think things are guaranteed to get better or easier, which is why I have to learn how to get stronger and more resilient.