– Jerzy Gregorek
Resilience
My native language is Farsi, and being bilingual I’ve learned that not all words have literal equivalents in another language. However, there is a single word for resilience in Farsi. It’s Esteghamat. It means to stand and withstand.
I believe there is an essential and an elective part to resiliency.
The essential part, we will all come to need to rely on, repeatedly, in our lives. For each of us, it’s not a matter of if but when. Adversity happens. Tragedies, small or big, happen when we least expect them and when we are least prepared for them.
The elective is if you go beyond surviving what life throws at you and want to thrive. From this place we can start the next journey of our development and transformation.
I’m fascinated with both.
For the latter, practice and adaptation are required. Resiliency is a state that we need to cultivate. It’s a practice and a process. Training our nervous system to get over the shock and cope and learn to self-soothe (in a healthy manner), requires sitting in and with things that otherwise are easiest to escape from.