Power of RESILIENCY

My gosh, resiliency is worth an entire blog of its own!  Adult or child, there is perhaps no other factor so powerful as resiliency - the ability to bounce back. It's more powerful than intelligence or talent, money or position.  Time & again, it's the difference between surviving & thriving.

One of my grannie clients leaves folks in awe with her resiliency.  She looks at dire situations & sees the good to be extracted - and digs it out.  

Much like my mother.  Perhaps many olders are like Mom - she handled the well-nigh impossible-to-bear with a smile on her face & the ability to shield herself from as much unpleasantness as possible in her heart.  Yet, near the end of her life, in her late 80s & early 90s, Mom became trult resilient, lookng tough times straight in the eye & dealing with them, rather than emotionally scampering away to hide.  

Mom became someone who could see a daunting challenge, the difficult, eveb the downright awful & tackle whatever IT may be, rather than feeling sidelined or sacked.

Years past, older people - particularly the significantly elderly - were honored as exemplars of resiliency.  Now, with the way our American culture has shaken out, that's rarer & rarer in the USA.  But our elders are just as worthy of our appreciation & respect.  

Consider one of my grannie clients.  She lost both the man she loved & her only brother during World War II, yet kept her heart open to love, married a terrific guy & raised an awesome family.  She took blows that might have flattened a lot of folks & she stayed standing.  SHE doesn't think about that, she doesn't see herself as particularly resilient, yet the younger people - including geezers like my 62-year old self - who know her do & are filled with wonder.  

All of my older friends have experienced loss beyond my current imagination - children, spouses, businesses, careers, savings, health.  Some were estranged from loved ones or blocked from reaching a precious goal or faced any other number of heart aches & tough times.  My guess is that 90% of them would dismiss that they did anything exceptional in keeping going.  Yet it - and they - are.   

Once a week, I have the privilege to have dinner at my little hometown's senior residence.  Every week, I look around the room & am honored to be in the place of such exceptional people, each of whom probably seems himself or herself as quite ordinary.  What they have gone through to get to where they are, most in their 80s & 90s.  

Forget all the world events - the number of family wonders & woes they experienced, the personal challenges, the expectations that never happened, the happenings they never could have expected.  

I look around at each table & see people rich with dreams & histories.  

It breaks my heart when these friends shrug their shoulders at any suggestion they are role models to the rest of us.  Not all - there are certainly the ones who dwell on what goes wrong, who are still with us physically but were emotionally flattened years ago.  But they are, in my experience, the rarity.  Most people I know who have achieved any considerable age have also developed a pretty impressive life perspective - it sometimes takes some digging to get at it, but it's almost always there.  

Most olders don't see the depth of their resiliency because it's never been honored.  

My mother certainly didn't.  She wrote off  my dogged efforts to get her to see it as mere puffery, a loving daughter trying to build up her spirits.  From her late teens, Mom was hit with tragedy & loss.  Her beloved father died when she was just nineteen;  months later, the Stock Market Crash turned her dreams of teaching into dust.  She was left with the primary care of her own mother, a truly horrific parent.  The man she expected to marry betrayed her.  A child was killed at age eleven; months later, the lumber yard where Dad was a vice president burned to the ground & the owner decided not to rebuild.  Her O Best Beloved died when they were in their early sixties.  In her mid-60s, Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.  For decades, she had an up & down relationship with her adult children, including myself.  

She always saw herself as a marshmallow, not an Iron Lady.  Praise be for the internet & the many women she touched through participating in several online (e-mail, back then) discussion groups.  Slowly, surely, she started to think that maybe, just maybe she had more grit than she'd thought.  That inkling of reality grew & grew, until it became certainty & belief in her own powers of resiliency.

In Mom's last few years, she took steps toward healthier self-knowledge which she knew might - and did - alienate most of her children.  It speaks volumes for her resiliency that Mom took the risk, knowing the odds of maintaining upbeat contact were against her - and counted the risk worth it. But that resilience wasn't new.  What was already there was simply recognized.  

One of the great gifts we youngers can give our older friends & loved ones it helping mirror back to them their own resilence.  A total win-win scenario - we get to draw strength & deeper undestanding from exceptional role models, they get to realize accept self-honor that their so-called ordinary lives have been filled with extraordinary moments of grit determination courage - resiliency.

To my incredible friends at Rydal Park & Cairnwood Village - a tip of my hat & my hand over my heart, honoring & loving all that you are & all you give to this most appreciative younger!