Inevitably, sooner or later, everyone faces a situation that calls for the exercise of varying degrees of personal resilience. It could be the loss of a loved one, a serious setback in one’s health or career, betrayal by a trusted friend, or the worrisome waywardness of an offspring. Adversities and crises come in many avatars and it requires resilience to counter and overcome these.
Resilience can be defined as the ability to recover from unpleasant or damaging events. In other words, it’s buoyancy or the ability to stay afloat, undaunted by the onslaught of adversity, however disabling or traumatic it may be. Personal resilience marks out a person as one who can stand up to — and, most important, recover from — the harsh blows of fate without wilting.
Lacking resilience, many let a crisis or adversity get the better of them, often ending up chronically depressed. Quite understandably, they take longer to recover from the ill-effects buffeting them and sometimes even buckle under the impact of a crisis all too easily.
Children, undoubtedly, are the best examples of resilience. Punish or chastise one for a wrongdoing and you will find that he or she doesn’t remain subdued for long; their exuberance is soon very much in evidence. And perhaps the Ukrainians, locked in an unsought and undesired struggle for survival, exemplify resilience as a nation. Instances of resilience can be seen everywhere.
Basically, resilience stems from one’s ability to face a crisis head-on and blunt its impact (or, at least, minimise its effect) by drawing on one’s reserves of fortitude and optimism. It’s the hallmark of people who want to move on with their lives notwithstanding the unsettling ill-effects of adversity. It also implies somehow overcoming the odds stacked heavily against one and emerging from the crisis a stronger individual, determined to forge ahead with one’s life or career.
Fortunately, resilience is a vital characteristic inherent in all humans, surfacing when there’s a personal upheaval or setback in one’s life. All it takes to bring it to the fore, forcefully, is a positive and optimistic frame of mind as well as a determination to restore normalcy (or an even tenor) to one’s life at the earliest.
Resilience, of course, is the antithesis of fatalism. Bad times are inescapable for most of us, and without reserves of resilience one can seldom cope with the reversals, setbacks and stumbling-blocks that life inevitably throws up from time to time. To survive in a harsh and fiercely competitive world, resilience is indispensable. It’s a ‘resuscitator’ that revitalises one when down in the dumps. Indeed, sans resilience, there can be no progress in life. In short, it’s the springboard to normalcy after a serious setback.
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