Warrior Mother's Strength, The Science of Resilience, Checking Your Toolbox
Existential Espresso Vol. 18
What I’ve read:
Warrior Mother’s strength
Recently, I’ve been going down the rabbit hole of Quora life questions and answers. It’s probably because I’m becoming more interested in using my platform to give voice to real-life stories that we can all be inspired by and/or learn something from.
This is one of the questions that caught my eye last week:
"My son got sentenced to 15 years in prison. He is 20 years old. I don’t want him to feel depressed and give up. Is there anything I can do for him while he is in prison?"
There were plenty of caring and compassionate answers, but there was one that stood out.
It comes from a man who’s spent 22 years in prison. I won’t paraphrase or quote anything that he said because the answer is short enough for you to read it.
I will tell you why it left such an impression on me that I decided to share it rather than some book or an essay: It has compassion but no pity. It tries to give hope while recognizing the difficult and ugly truth. And if you’ve been following my writing for some time, you know how much importance I place on that kind of approach to life’s difficulties.
And if you think that this is too extreme a situation for you to draw anything from it, think again. You don’t need to end up in a concentration camp to find Viktor Frankl’s "Man’s Search for Meaning" relevant and valuable. Similarly, I chose to write about having a price on my head and living with a bulletproof vest because I believe there are lessons in those stories that can be applied to even the most ordinary lives. (Although we know there is no such thing as an ordinary life.)
What I’ve listened to:
The Science of Resilience - Kelly McGonigal on the Collective Insights podcast
Who would’ve thought that stress can actually be good for you? I guess most people reading this would, that is, people who didn’t fall into the trap of living a life focused solely on pleasure and comfort. But it's still worth listening to someone explain scientifically why stress isn't always our enemy.
Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D, is a psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University.
As she puts it,
"Stress actually is your body and your brain's attempt to help you cope with life, with life as it is, to meet the present moment, to deal with reality and to find ways to not only survive, but also thrive."
In this podcast, they discuss what stress is, the ways it affects us, what resilience is and how we build it, and even how exercise can help you deal with stress (one of my favorite topics, as most of you know).
However, the most interesting part for me was hearing more about oxytocin, the stress hormone, as I'd only heard about it before but didn’t actually know anything about it.
You can listen to the podcast here.
What I’ve been thinking about:
Make an inventory of your toolbox.
I guess most people reading this are trying to improve themselves and their lives in some way.
And on that journey, you collect tools in the form of lessons and ideas.
However, if you collect them but don’t get the chance to use some of them, you might even forget that they are there. And when you face a problem to be solved or a decision to be made, you might think that you don’t have the necessary tool to deal with what’s in front of you.
This happened to me recently. There is a valuable lesson I learned some time ago; however, there was no opportunity for me to use that knowledge. That is, until recently.
And when I was faced with this new situation, I instinctively looked only at the ideas and lessons I'd been using in my recent past. I thought this was something I didn’t know how to deal with. It was only when I took some time to reflect on everything I'd learned on my journey and all the tools I'd collected that I realized I already had the answer or the solution.
They say that if you don’t use it, you lose it. Well, sometimes there is no opportunity to use it. So I guess the next best thing is to regularly make an inventory of all the tools you have so that you don’t forget those you haven’t been using.
Thank you for reading.
Stay strong, love life, and never feel sorry for yourself.
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