NOT JUST COUNTING THE DAYS: HOW RESILIENCE, CONNECTION, AND TIME CAN MAKE ALL THINGS EASIER.

So when I think about overcoming adversity, getting through tough times, or helping others to do those things, my first instinct is to use those cliche quotes that we have all heard more times than we really want to try to count. Saying, or hearing, the phrase “it will all get better” can be at times uplifting and other times like a kick in gut while you’re already down on the ground. 

But, while preparing for this week’s conversation, I looked up some quotes on these topics to see if there might be a few words of wisdom to guide my thoughts. Here are some of the quotes I came across:

• Turn your wounds into wisdom.― Oprah Winfrey
• Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.― Helen Keller
• Fall seven times, stand up eight. — Japanese proverb
• Grief and resilience live together.― Michelle Obama
• A good half of the art of living is resilience.― Alain de Botton
• Joy collected over time fuels resilience - ensuring we’ll have reservoirs of emotional strength when hard things do happen. — Brene Brown

​Do any of these do something for you? Are they helpful? What about them makes them so? Or what makes them not helpful?

The typical response to tragedy is something akin to “time heals all wounds”. And … sure. But is it really the time that heals it? Or, is it that the time is just giving us the distance we need in order to build up our resilience? A resilience built with care and the strength of those connections we have fostered throughout our lives. Connections with our families, both given and chosen, friends, co-workers, heck even random strangers. 

It’s easier to let time heal our wounds. It’s inactive. It takes almost literally NO work. But … do they really heal? For anyone who has ever attempted to not deal with “something”, has is really ever gone away? My personal experience tells me no. That I was fooling myself. Even though I wasn’t. 

Plainly put … time can do wonderful things in the course of our healing and recovering from things in our lives. But time cannot do it alone. We need resilience to get over (and through) adversity. And our resilience comes from the connections we have with others.

These are just my thoughts. What are yours? Do you agree/disagree/think the whole is way off base/want some cheese? Let’s talk about it.