More about Resilence

“After all, tomorrow is another day.” I was in high school when my boyfriend gave me the book Gone With the Wind. I wasn’t much of a reader. Dyslexia makes reading slow. I spent my time reading textbooks, not fiction. The 1000 pages of Gone with the Wind represented a huge challenge, but it was Christmas break, so I opened the book and was immediately drawn in.
I want to set aside modern political criticism of romanticizing the Antebellum South and just focus on Scarlett O’Hara. She was raised in privilege. She lived on a beautiful plantation with people waiting on her. Her biggest worries were what parties she would attend and what man would court her. Then all that changes with the war. People around her die, the plantation was pillaged and burned. The crops were destroyed and there is Scarlett digging in the dirt with her hands foraging for food. Her vow “As God is my witness, They’m not going to get me. I’m going to live through this…” Those words are so powerful. They will live in my brain forever.
So what does that have to do with being resilient? Everything. Scarlett is trying to cheat her circumstances. She could have just shrunk in despair of losing everything, but she chooses to fight for her life. She was willing to lie, cheat or kill to get back what was once hers. Throughout the remainder of the story, we see Scarlett making both good and bad decisions. Decisions that may seem to the observer as ones that didn’t contribute to the well-being of anyone, but she had a plan and she did her best to make things right as she once knew them.
Everyone lives in the world of uncertainty. Not just those of us who have cancer in our medical charts. Everyone lives in the world of uncertainty. We make decisions every day based on what we know today and based on what we value. When we decide to do something, we don’t know how it will turn out. Only in time will the outcome be revealed to us. Personally, I can kick myself over and over again for the decisions I made about caring for myself before I got sick. But that will not do me any good. Just like the fact we can’t see the future we can’t change the past. I have to remember that I made the best decisions that I could based on the circumstances I was in and the with knowledge I had atthe time. I think that is called forgiveness.
There is not one thing that makes up resilience. It’s a cluster of things that when put together keep us upright and moving forward and hopefully that tomorrow is another day. I’m moving forward as though I have all the time in the world. I’m choosing to do that because it helps me feel “normal.” It helps to get involved with things that take up a great deal of my time. It keeps me moving forward. It is helping me cheat my circumstances. If tomorrow I get the news that my health is failing once again and that time is limited, I will not regret the decisions I’m making. I will always believe I can cheat my circumstances.

Denise