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| Celebrating another birthday on that path to old age note the walker I'm sitting in |
The word that’s on my mind
today is resilience. The dictionary defines it as the capacity to recover
quickly from difficult circumstances. I think of it as the ability to bounce
back. Several years ago I was in the hospital with stage four acute kidney
failure, caused by an antibiotic that I should have known better than to take.
I had already within recent years been hospitalized for a hip reconstruction (a
fractured hip so bizarre that people in the hospital looked at me and said, “Oh,
your ‘the hip’” and a diagnosis of atrial fibrillation. By this time I was
feeling a bit down when a medical resident, a woman, came in to talk with me.
I said, “I guess this means
that my health is going to change forever.” I was having a pity party, but I saw
visions of dialysis three times a week dancing in my head. She replied, “Oh, I
don’t know. You seem to be pretty resilient.” Right then, right there, that
woman, probably unknown to her, gave me a great gift. I began to think of
myself as resilient. I was in the hospital for six or seven days, but every day
my creatinine (high is bad, low is good) came down. Eventually I went home and
over the next months my creatinine came down almost to normal levels. The
nephrologist saw me every three months, but my triumph came when he said, “I’ll
see you in a year.”
I think so much of resilience
is in our minds, and once I began to think of myself as resilient, I began to bounce
back. Christian says I’ve been resilient about other things, like moving into
the cottage. There are lots of things I cannot do these days, between the
confines of the cottage and the limitations of my mobility: I cannot give the
big parties I used to love or even the elaborate dinner parties for six that I
loved. There are some recipes that I’d love to tackle but can’t with a hot
plate and an toaster oven—those that boast of a skillet dinner you start on the
stove and finish in the oven are beyond me. I have a closet that is
nonfunctional for me—the hanging clothes are so high that I cannot reach them,
even standing, and have to plan ahead so that I can ask Jordan to get this
shirt or that down. But I love my cottage. Christian says I have made it work.
This is not to brag about my
health or resilience to my friends who are walking the eighties path with me
but to suggest that it helps to give yourself a message of resilience. When I
posted about life in a tiny house yesterday, one friend wrote that she didn’t
know if she could do that or not, but then concluded she probably could. My
message is that we can do almost anything If we set our mind to it.
It seems to me a companion
word to resilience is flexibility. It’s too easy to cling to the old ways, the
ways we’ve always done things, from cooking to child raising. Living with one
of my grown children who is raising an adorable seventeen-year-old son, you
have no idea how hard it is to keep from saying, “When you were his age, you
had to be home for Sunday supper.” Or some such. A long-time friend was here
the other day and mentioned how angry she was to be quarantined at a daughter’s
house for Thanksgiving because she developed covid. “But I apologized,” she
said, “Their house, their rules.” That’s flexibility. And perhaps apologizing
is resilience.
To my friends walking with me,
think about those two words: resilience and flexibility. How do they apply to
your life?
Okay, sermon over.
