Resilience Now

I. "Whoa, take 'er easy there, PILGRIM".

BELOW: Yesterday I adapted this John Wayne image/quote from a stained old T-shirt I'd pulled out of textile-baling at work.
I sewed a magnolia blossom over the gun in JW's hand; cut the image off its original T-shirt; and sewed it onto this one. T-shirt material is treacherous--soft and shifty. I sewed by hand (I like that), and it took me all afternoon.

I like it! I don't want to wear John Wayne's face though, even ironically.
Marz  has a Star Trek t-shirt she says I could cut up for Capt Kirk's face--I'll do that swap today, I hope.

UPDATE: The Pilgrim T-shirt, now with Captain Kirk!(Bonus—my giant Boston fern that will shelter the girlettes’ little Xmas tree under its plant stand.)

________

This is my first free weekend in weeks (Sun-Mon off) with nothing planned, and that's really good for me, but it's for a sad reason:
bink got Covid for the first time on Friday.
She's not in danger, but she's pretty sick--headache, bad cough (cough cough cough), fever.
Clear lungs, though--whew.

I'd spent Thanksgiving Thursday with bink and Maura, so I've been exposed, and I canceled a couple meet ups this weekend, just in case.
I've not become sick, nor has Maura, or Marz, who was also there.
Fingers crossed.

II. "Hunt for the Good Stuff"

While I sewed, I listened to an episode about grief on the podcast Hidden Brain--"Life After Loss", with Lucy Hone. She was a resilience researcher whose 12-y.o. daughter--and the daughter's friend & her mother--were killed by a car driver who ran a light.

"In the blink of an eye, [Hone said] I find myself flung to the other side of the equation.... Instead of being the resilience expert, suddenly, I'm the grieving mother... my world smashed to smithereens.
Suddenly, I'm the one on the end of all this expert advice.
And I can tell you, I didn't like what I heard one little bit."

--from Lucy Hone's TED Talk, "3 Secrets of Resilient People".

The three "secrets" are teachable, everyday skills, Hone says. "Resilience isn't some fixed trait." They are:

1. "Resilient people get that shit happens.
They know that suffering is part of life. This doesn't mean they actually welcome it in, they're not actually delusional."

This reminds me of Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter not replacing their old microwave that took 12-minutes to pop popcorn:
"Nothing is easy, and why would it be?"
In a funny way, this translates to "take 'er easy, pilgrim"--the idea being, it's not going to be easy (for anyone) to walk through this world, so don't be surprised, and don't make it harder on yourself.

2. "Resilient people are really good at choosing carefully where they select their attention. They have a habit of realistically appraising situations, and typically, managing to focus on the things that they can change, and somehow accept the things that they can't.
This is a vital, learnable skill for resilience.

And, 3.

"Resilient people ask themselves,

Is what I'm doing helping or harming me?

This is a question that's used a lot in good therapy. And boy, is it powerful. This was my go-to question in the days after the girls died. I would ask it again and again.

'Should I go to the trial and see the driver? Would that help me or would it harm me?'

Well, that was a no-brainer for me, I chose to stay away."

An alternate way of putting this that I like, from the Ignatian practice of discernment: Is this consolation or desolation?

What jumped out at me from the Hidden Brain episode was an addition to Hone's point no. 2--(pay attention to where you put your attention):
HUNT THE GOOD STUFF.

"Hunting the Good Stuff counteracts the negativity bias to create positive emotion, and to notice and analyze what is good."

"As humans, we are really good  at noticing threats and weaknesses. We are hardwired for that negative. Negative emotions stick to us like Velcro, whereas positive emotions and experiences seems to bounce off like Teflon."

I was thinking of changing "hunt" to "search" or something friendlier like that, but "hunt" is best:
while hunting has been a normal survival skill in the history of humanity, it can be quite difficult.
(What do I know, I've never hunted. But you know.)

Anyway--"good stuff" sounds chipper, but it is hard.

And we all have some hard stuff to do.

III. To Hunt, or not to Hunt

BELOW: My 49-year-old mother, Lytton Davis, left, seeing 23-year-old me off on my ten-day bike trip to Duluth and along Lake Superior.

Hunting, about which I know almost nothing, reminds me of The Deer Hunter (1978, USA).
I'd first seen the movie on a bike trip I took when I was twenty-three (photo above). I'd stopped on a rainy day at a crummy motel outside Duluth, where I watched the movie on TV.

Have you seen it? It's a strong movie about a group of friends-- steelworkers in Pennsylvania--going to fight in Vietnam, and the disturbing aftermath.

It stunned me, and--weirdly--it encouraged me.
Gave me strength.
(I'm reminded that the etymology of "comfort" is with {co–} + strength [fort, like fortitude].)

Retrospectively, I see that it spoke to me about surviving horror––with and without resilience (mostly a matter of luck)––
including the horror of being unable to save someone you love (the famous Russian roulette scene with Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken).

CONTENT NOTE: Suicide

We all have something. 

In my case, the person I couldn't save was my mother, from her own despair, which I was still trying to do at that time...
Did I sense that that wasn't in my control, my power?
Maybe?
Anyway, though it would be seventeen years from the time I saw The Deer Hunter until my mother shot herself, that ending for her was always a possibility, and no one was surprised when it came.

I recently read a book of Anne Sexton's letters, edited by her daughter Linda. I'd never cared for Sexton's poetry, but wow, did the voice in the letters remind me of my mother's. Expressive! Smart & funny!
Manipulative.

Linda writes at the end of the book,
"Anne's death was not unexpected. All those close to her had known that one day she would choose to commit suicide."

I wouldn't say my mother's death by her own hand was inevitable.
It wasn't. Time and chance play a hand in all things.
But yeah, no one was surprised.

Uh, anyway, I guess that makes me the Robert DeNiro character, who survives, and is left wiser, more compassionate, and more resourceful, at great cost.

Am I?

Are you?

I guess I am... and I guess I call on that in my work and life, in crafting the Philosophy and Theology of Slob Knob Alley.
But I think I'm also … worse than I might have been/—shut down, in some ways I wouldn't have been if my mother had been . . . luckier.

But as I keep saying, we all have something. 

We get to keep using whatever resilience we gain, because life isn't hard just one time, right?
When Lucy Hone's daughter died, Lucy and her family had already survived a massive, destructive earthquake in Christchurch, NZ, a few years earlier.

Why bother hunting the good stuff, though, when bad stuff just keeps happening?

Besides having a naturally upbeat personality before her daughter's death, Lucy had teen sons and a husband she loves.
So there's that, which not everyone has.

She also wanted to help other people, and that's something too. She went on to write from her own experience Resilient Grieving: How to Find Your Way Through Devastating Loss (2017).

The possibility that you might help other people--that we need you--the unexpected stranger, even--is a life force. It might/could seem sort of cruel to ask someone who's suffering to hang on for other people, but there's that.

The life story itself is a life force--curiosity--wondering, what happens next?
The other day a customer told me that her sister, who has advanced Parkinson's, said that one thing that makes her sad about dying is not being able to read anymore.
You can't turn the page if you're dead.

My mother ran out of all those reasons, and that's something that can happen. I wish it didn't, but that was never in my power.

I do seek out tips about resilience, and I do appreciate help such as the reminder to hunt the good stuff, and I am very curious about where this is all heading,
but I hate when people imply that other people can Just Do It. Just choose the good.
You can choose, but you have to be able to want to choose.
(You can have what you want, but you have to want it.)
If we are able to choose to hunt––and if we can choose to pull the trigger, or not, like the DeNiro character––we're lucky.

And now I'm going to go find Capt Kirk's face to cover John Wayne's because I want to tell a different story, and in this case, I can.

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