The Walking Dead has started the season off with the theme of resiliency. IGN stated it nicely, ““Can we come back from the things we’ve done?” Can we recover from the mistakes we’ve made or are we doomed to ever be haunted by them, endlessly paying the piper? Well, we certainly cannot come back from our missteps until we stop repeating them.
In this zombie apocalyptic setting, the survivors are now considering whether they have lost their humanity. As a writer, a homesteader, a teacher and a mother, I wonder about these same concepts. Is there a point after which a person is changed forever? What happens to people when they face challenges, stresses, trauma? As a writer, I love imagining hero/heroine stories and writing about how a character can and will overcome. As a homesteader, there are always things that go wrong, but if you are going to grow your own food and preserve it, then you have to be committed and that requires a certain level of just gutting it out, trying again, working through and never giving up. As a teacher, student failure was the biggest crisis I faced. Too often, their culture worked against them so even when they had an innate sense of self-determination and an incredible strength of spirit, their life circumstances kept hitting them until it was no surprise when some began to drop out of school, if not physically then emotionally. As a mother I worried how to teach my children that regardless of what life handed them to never give up, to never surrender, and now as a grandmother, I face the same concerns, but in a world full of far more challenges than I could have ever imagined.
Given the reality of the environment, the economy, our leadership, and our culture, it is no big surprise that talking about and teaching resiliency is so fashionable. An internet search on resiliency pulls up everything from students to children to adults to business to websites to communities and more, including dogs and cats. From my perspective, the focus on resiliency is good news for everyone, unless you are watching the cat insisting on staying in the dryer, which actually isn’t an example of being resilient, but of being a cat. In every other instance, the more we teach resiliency, the more we learn to be resilient, the more we build our businesses and develop our communities so they are resilient, the better off we all will be.
So what is resilience? In a nutshell, it’s a person’a ability to handle stress and adversity, it is coping in such a way that the person comes back to a normal way of functioning, and it is growing so the person may actually function better after that adversity. It is a process and not a personality trait. Resilience can be fostered by families, schools, communities, and social policies, all of which are considered “protective factors” that help a person handle exposure to risk.
If you’re having trouble conceptualizing what resiliency looks like, watch Louis C.K. explain why he doesn’t give his children a cell phone. It’s a lesson in resiliency, which came to me via In the moment. It’s all about going against the culture, thinking for yourself, facing reality, learning empathy, being yourself, and feeling all your feelings, which is pretty much all a zombie is not. So I guess if we didn’t have cell phones, we could cancel the apocalypse. The bigger issue is whether we would be able to come back from being that connected all the time. Living in the present would be pretty radical, but it would be resilient.
