Someone said adversity builds character, but someone else said adversity reveals character. I'm pleasantly surprised with my resilience. I persevere, and not just blindly. I take the best, get rid of the rest, and move on, realizing that you can make a choice to take the good.
The longer we stay in a violating situation, the more traumatized we become. If we don't act on our own behalf, we will lose spirit, resourcefulness, energy, health, perspective, and resilience. We must take ourselves out of violating situations for the sake of our own wholeness.
[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.
'The Others' books take place in an alternate Earth where the Earth natives have been the dominant predators throughout the world's history, and humans are nowhere near the top of the food chain. But humans are clever and resilient, if not always wise, and have made some bargains with the Others in order to survive.
India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them. Over the centuries, many powers have defeated Indian armies; but none has ever proved immune to this capacity of the subcontinent to somehow reverse the current of colonisation, and to mould those who attempt to subjugate her. So vast is India, and so uniquely resilient and deeply rooted are her intertwined social and religious institutions, that all foreign intruders are sooner or later either shaken off or absorbed.
“When you have a person who walks into a cocktail party, and within five minutes everybody knows they are a survivor of 9-11 - that's not a good sign, ... The person with strong resilience accepts the trauma as part of their life_but it is just a part of their life. They have a life, a self, that goes beyond that trauma.”
Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that's good.
And life can have its way with me. It won't break me. Neither you nor me. That determined faith in our own resilience is our only weapon against the cynical, the weak, those who talk of honor but do not practice the word they so loudly and vigorously screech.
I want everybody to know that I don't care who you are, where you're from, if you're popular or not: we all have haters. But you have to be resilient. You have to not allow them to have the power over you, where you start believing the things they say.
“Man, we're just resilient. We've got a pretty good road record (8-5), but tonight I thought what we did was pretty incredible, considering that Eddie (Jones) got ejected, Shane Battier fouled out and we still were able to pull this game out.”