Adequate Resilience With and Without Ill-health

Adequate Resilience With and Without Ill-health

The Resiliency Initiative

The basis of adequate resilience isn’t strength. A moments reflection reveals that we cannot rely on strength, for any foundation of strength are the mind and body. And the mind and body could be afflicted at any moment. If you have meditated on death (see the pdf on spotlight), this fact becomes even more striking. While we are alive, we can move and make and do. At death, even the body is of no help. Death is ever present, it is always. So is ill-health. When we are well, we are actually without ill-health. The bedrock of such an existence cannot be strength. We can however give ourselves some strength, and the ability to do that is in many ways the foundation of adequate resilience.

It might really be more apt to say that we can have firm resolve. Any strength we acquire comes from firm resolve and not the other way around. If we generate the firm resolve to see things through, we might be able to carry ourselves through severely trying circumstances. Strangely, such resolve comes from the difficulty itself. In presenting itself when we are least prepared, difficulty reminds us that we cannot overlook pain. That we have to keep preparing for it. If we keep preparing for pain, we can be firm with and without it. Also, the impetus for this readiness isn’t strength but vulnerability or perhaps more accurately, vigilance.

Thus, firm resolve as well as vigilance with and without ill-health might be thought of as the basis of adequate resilience.

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