Home Blog 21

21

by admin
Landslide Novel 1

“Psychology Today” describes resilience as “that ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their resolve, they find a way to rise from the ashes.”

Life has a way of creating hardships. Bad things happen. Mistakes are made. Often, they are our mistakes, but we also suffer from the mistakes of others. I thought Husband expressed this well to our Eldest when he was experiencing his first professional challenge. “You can’t believe how creative God can be with his train wrecks,” Husband told Eldest. “They come when you least expect it, from all directions, at the most unforeseen times.”

It is hard not to sink under the weight of bad news or heavy burdens. It is hard not to condemn ourselves, even if the world is more forgiving of us than we are of ourselves. It is especially hard to control our emotions, to not get emotionally invested in the probabilities of possibilities, to stay with the facts. For me, the trick isn’t so much to avoid the train wrecks – although admittedly that is good to do. Instead, the trick is to remember that when bad things happen, we move toward problems, learn from mistakes, and seize the new opportunities that this learning presents.

“But I feel that I need to go back to work now,” Eldest lamented, cutting short a long-awaited and well-deserved vacation which was all the more precious as it was some of the few days a year we are together as a family of six. “That’s right,” Beloved concurred. “When there is a train wreck, you go and sit by your train. You oversee it getting hoisted up and put back on the tracks. If that’s not possible, then you supervise the debris getting cleared. You reroute people and cargo, until all is flowing again just as it should.”

0 comment

Keep reading