My Anywhere But Here Blog

I was thinking back yesterday on how we talk about history repeating itself and asking ourselves; is it good that we allow ourselves to repeat it? But then, today, a word popped up in a commercial I saw, and I thought to myself, maybe we should rethink that. Does it harm us, or does it bring about some good? I think the key thing is what we do with that information from history. How do we respond? 

The word that sparked these thoughts was “resilience,” one of my favorite words, because over the years I have had to be resilient on many levels—career-wise, education-wise, just my day-to-day living with, say, now my cancer. All of these things required a great deal of resiliency. 

Resiliency, just like respect, requires learning how to pick ourselves back up when we lose our footing or slip into uncertainty. There is an old saying I love, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” so it is basically when the road grows heavy with obstacles and such things get in our way, this is more than likely when we find a strength we didn’t know dwelled deep within us, and that is generally when resiliency comes into play. 

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Right now, in the world, it seems like we are having more hard days than easy ones, and more problems than solutions on how to resolve all these different issues. We seem to be lost and unable to find our way in this new chaos we are seeing set before us. We seem to be losing our voices and our fight to carry on. 

There is a song I love by singer-songwriter Seth Schlueter, and I think he explains it well—how to fully be resilient and to recharge ourselves. After all, isn’t that, in a way, what resiliency is? Recharging our lives and course and redirecting the outcome of an extremely challenging situation, or our life’s history. So that when we do look back, we don’t see failure or unresolved problems; we see perseverance and a willingness to believe that all can be righted from a wrong. 

And that maybe it starts with a person being assured that if we pause and if we rest, then we can recharge and find resiliency to make a change—and, for the most part, a change for the better. Seth talks about this in his song. 

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Lyrics Excerpt 

When the worry’s like a whirlwind 

And I just keep spinning round and round 

I feel like such a mess 

And I’m craving something quiet 

Is there a place that I can go to close my eyes and just forget 

That I’m not okay? 

’Cause I’m not okay 

But even as I wait 

I can hear you say 

Come and rest 

Come and rest 

Come and rest in peace 

Take a breath 

Take a step 

Take it easy 

Let the weight leave your chest 

Let it fall on peace 

Come and rest in peace 

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And as I said in the beginning of this blog space, “My Anywhere but Here”peace can be any way you see it. Myself, I see it as resting in the knowledge that God has me and is holding me up in times when resiliency eludes me or hasn’t quite manifested itself yet in me—but I know it is buried deep within. All I have to do is take deep breaths and steps and, well, lighten the obstacles I have been trying to journey through and let, ultimately, peace fall on me. 

So, what is our goal in our journey to “My Anywhere but Here”? Is it to let things weigh us down, or for us to carry with us as many mistakes as we can and possibly things that don’t improve our circumstances? Or is it to tell ourselves we have the resiliency to move forward—not going back, but moving forward—to make a better place for not just ourselves, but for all of us?