Quotes About Resilience

Stories can seem like tragedies, depending where they stopped.

strive to be comfortable in chaos and complexity. Be as a shaman who walks in many worlds.

The current scene hasn't arisen by chance. Rather, there's "a definite strategy to it," according to John Altman, who began reviving the old farm David's Folly with his wife. Like Semler and Moffet, Altman knows making a resilient alternative to the mainstream requires knowing how "to cultivate the community" as well as the land. These efforts are succeeding; this remote peninsula supports three weekly farmers' markets during the summer and one in the winter.

Margot Benary-Isbert

I think it's really important to maintain a positive attitude. It might not solve all your problems, but keep it up long enough and it will piss off enough people to make it worthwhile.

Running, I soon realized, was the best way to stay ahead of fear.

Since the accident, Jonathan had noticed, she held on to things, a doorframe, a chair, as it either she or the world needed steadying.

But in 1856, Fort Yuma was hellish for reasons beyond the heat. It was bedeviled by blinding dust storms and prone to Indian attacks. The barracks were plagued with ants, gnats, and, when the river was high, mosquitoes, and the toilets were open trenches heaped with dirt and lime to squelch the stench.

When Grinnell approached her, she cried quietly into her hands but let him lead her to the water, where she washed and changed into the calico dress an officer's wife had sent from the fort. Now, free of face paint and hair dye, and wearing Anglo garb, she was ready — or at least dressed — for her return.

She gave her name as "Olivino," recalled her father's surname as "Oatman" and said she'd had six siblings, mentioning Lucy and Lorenzo by name. She identified her abductors as Apaches. Asked if they had treated her well, she said, "No. They whipped me." In response to the same question about the Mohaves, she "seemed pleased," noted Burke, and answered, "Very well.

Failure leads to Success.

Mistakes are expected, respected, and investigated

Tears may be dried up, but the heart--never.

I am a black woman tall as a cypress strong beyond all definition still defying place and time and circumstance assailed impervious indestructible Look on me and be renewed

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

When the end of the world comes, it won't be the ones that cry who survive, but the ones who spit.

Can we cut the Zen crap for a moment?" I ask. "I'm trying to beat this bag to a pulp.

Life has a way of turning things around. Those who mourn well know this. As a result, they also live well--with courage and curiosity.

We routinely replace damanged parts of ourselves with new ones that are, arguably, more resilient, more able to handle challenges. As long as we avoid the trap of growing our skin so thick that nothing gets through, getting bruised can only boost our ability to cope with whatever life throws at us.

Yet if we are to take the Lacanian account of singularity seriously, we must admit that what really counts in life is not our ability to evade chaos, but rather our capacity to meet it in such a manner as to not be irrevocably broken or demolished.

From this perspective, creativity is a means of diffusing and managing loss, of transforming it into something that we can tolerate and live through, and, in the long run, perhaps even use as a basis for new life.

It is, in other words, in part through painful processes of loss and separation that we arrive at a sense of who we are. Such processes function as "boundary-creating" experiences that build singular and (more or less) self-sufficient psyches.

Within this mercurial reality, our happiness depends less on how well or badly we tackle the myriad ordeals of our lives than on how dexterously we withstand the fact that the ground underneath our feet shifts constantly.

If we are lucky, we gradually gain an appreciation for how destruction can give rise to unprecedented forms of vitality, how our capacity to survive distress leaves behind a smoldering residue that we can draw on to constitute empowering life narratives. Although the process of living is perhaps inherently damaging, we can learn to make use of this damage—the same way that we can learn to make use of accidents—to generate more vigorous forms of life.