Another “R”

 

When You’re Going Through Hell, Keep Going – Winston Churchill

It is said that in school they teach you the three “Rs”- reading, writing and arithmetic, but there is another “R” that we’ve all be studying, whether we like it or not, and that is resilience. And for many of us this, may be the most important class we will ever take.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines resilience as “the ability to be happy, successful, etc. again after something difficult or bad has happened" or “the ability of a substance to return to its usual shape after being bent, stretched, or pressed."

I don’t know about you but for nearly a year since the pandemic gripped us, I’ve been feeling a bit bent, stretched and pressed, and I bet many of you are too. 

 

To borrow from Charles Dickens, this time has not been the “best of times.” Unless you are detached from reality, I’m guessing that you and everyone you know has suffered something this past year, be it the postponement of a special event like a wedding, the loss of a loved one or maybe a job or income, the ability to travel at will, freedom to breathe without a face covering, or maybe a way of life or an enormous amount of anxiety over what our future holds.

So, how do we spring back from all of this? According to a 2018 Psychology Today article, called “Resilience 101,” one of the most important things you can do when enduring or trying to spring back from a difficulty is to check your negative thought patterns. Are you hearing your mind repeating things like: I can’t take this much longer! This is never going to get better. What’s going to happen now?

You need to stop this. As I have mentioned in past columns, that when I was in my thirties, I suffered with an anxiety disorder and panic attacks, and one of the best books that helped me get my negative thoughts under control was Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by Dr. David Burns. The book teaches you to pay attention to what you are thinking and put the lie to them because you, essentially, are what you think. Therefore, if your mind is polluted with “stinkin thinkin,” you are going to be miserable. And don’t forget there is a mind-body-spirit connection.

If your thinking is negative, it affects your health and your spirit. It is a difficult task to rein in your thoughts, but there are some things you can do help. The first is to take good care of yourself—eat well, get out in the sun if we get a sunny day, exercise and get sleep. When you are tired, everything goes out of whack.

Spiritually, pray, meditate, and take time to be quiet, which is exceedingly harder to do these days with cell phones and all of us being cooped up together.

Also, reflect on your past, you’ve been an overcomer before, and you can do it again. Maybe you were cut from a team in high school, or maybe you lost a job or loved one. Maybe you failed at school or in business. No one escapes an education from the school of hard knocks. If you’ve made it this far, you can keep on going!

Finally, and most importantly, if you are really struggling, seek help. It may be as simple as just telling someone how you are feeling that will lighten your load, or maybe you need some professional help. 

There’s no shame in that. Smart people admit it when they need help. And I’ll clue you in on something: You are not alone. When I finally revealed that I was terribly worried and suffering from panic attacks, nearly everyone I told either revealed that they had felt that way sometime in their life or had someone in their immediate family struggling too. 

So, though we’ve all been tested this year, there is hope. Nothing bad lasts forever. One of my favorites quotes is: The Lowest Ebb is the Turning of the Tide. Here’s looking forward to that tide changing soon and all of us riding a wave of good times and fortunes and coming back better, stronger and wiser than ever.  

 

This article originally appeared in the February 2021 issue of Northern Connection magazine.

 

It’s Perfect – Not!

It was Father’s Day weekend thirty-one years ago. Married only a couple of years, my husband and I had moved into our first house that previous January. We’d spent that spring painting, wallpapering—the things you do to get a home into shape. On Saturday of that weekend, I’d cleaned the whole house while my husband had spent the day outside trimming hedges, weeding, and cutting grass in anticipation of a Father’s Day picnic for both sides of our family—the first event in our first home.

As we called it a day, I remember looking at our neatly manicured lawn and gleaming house and thinking, “Everything is perfect.”

Then the phone rang at 7:04 a.m. Who calls that early on a Sunday morning? I thought as my husband rolled over and answered it. When I saw the color drain from his face, I knew something was terribly wrong. He hung up and stared blankly at me, too stunned to show any emotion. “That was my mom. Tommy’s been killed in a motorcycle accident.” Tommy was his twenty-three-year-old little brother.

We’d anticipated a Father’s Day picnic filled with fun and laughter. Instead, we were now faced with death, identifying a body at the morgue, and making funeral arrangements.

So much for perfection.

Flash forward to June seven years later. I’m sitting in a counselor’s office after suffering for months with panic attacks. “From what I’ve observed,” the kind therapist said, “You are very hard on yourself. You need to allow yourself to be human. You think you have to be perfect.”

As you can see, my dance with perfection has been filled with missteps. From Tommy’s death, I learned that life is not perfect and never will be, and through my joust with anxiety, I learned that I am not perfect and never will be.

So, how does someone who’s had these types of reality checks with perfection square them with Jesus’s words in Matthew’s Gospel where He instructs us to “Be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

To a perfectionist, His words area a recipe for disaster. You may have heard the adage “Perfection is the enemy of the good.” Well, when we perfectionists get rolling, we tend to discount anything, however good, that does not meet our level of perfection. We get tangled up in being immaculate. I’ve worked hard not to be a perfectionist, so when I came across that bit of scripture again recently, I, once again, reacted to it with disregard and confusion—not a good way to react to scripture.

I know perfection is impossible and shouldn’t even be pursued lest I become paralyzed in my quest to be flawless. There is no perfection on this side of eternity. I know I cannot be perfect, I made myself sick trying. Why would Jesus impose such an impossible directive on those He loves?

Ah, but I’ve also come to learn that when Jesus commands us to do something, He always promises to provide us with the grace to achieve it. His words in John’s Gospel provide the key. “Apart from me you can do nothing.” Apart from Him, I cannot reach perfection. Apart from Him, the world wallows in sin and destruction. Perfection in the way Jesus means is a work of transformation and something for me not to achieve but to surrender to. Through Jesus and His act of redemption, we reach perfection. Paul in his letter to Philippians gives us this assurance: “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.”

I’ve learned that Jesus is working on me, and that sounds absolutely perfect to me.

(This originally appeared on the Catholic Writers Guild Blog.)