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  • Another New Year: Time, Change and Resiliency

    People seem much more likely to think about and make resolutions at the New Year’s season, than they are to think about change and resiliency.

    finding happiness in life

    That’s probably because we see the New Year’s season as a time for renewal and new beginnings, which in some respects, it certainly is. New Year’s resolutions allow us to feel that we are starting anew, perhaps that we are beginning again. I may have intended to use the exercise machine four times a week last year. That may have not worked out so well, — but here we are at New Year’s, and it’s a new beginning.

    This has validity and importance for people, without a doubt. Yet there are other significant dimensions to the coming of a New Year, that carry important meaning. In a time like ours, when we’re constantly buffeted by change, it’s important that these other dimensions, which involve the fullness of our life journey, also be recognized.

    Throughout the English-speaking world, it’s long been customary to take a moment in the beginning minutes of the New Year to sing Robert Burns’ “For Auld Lang Syne”. We might dismiss this as a musty tradition, but it’s worth bringing the lyrics of that tune into focus. The phrase itself is probably best translated as “for long long ago”, and the rhetorical question posed by the first lines is probably best rendered as:

    Is it right that old times be forgotten?

    Remember How You Got Here

    It’s easy to give this question endless amounts of smarmy overlay and dreary sentimentality. Yet it’s very important for each of our own lives and our journey to wholeness. In our time, the internet, smartphones and an endless succession of other technologies bring a continual influx of the new. It’s an era when “disruption” is seen as a positive, even life-giving thing. This current information culture gives us strong incentives to focus on the novel, and on what’s changing, rather than understanding and appreciating the things in our collective or personal past that have made us who and what we are today.

    Yet it’s important for each of us to turn a discerning and compassionate eye onto our own journey. We need to understand, in a self-compassionate way, how we got to where we are today. That entails understanding just how much change each of us has undergone to get here. It also entails understanding and appreciating the experiences that have really shaped us into the particular unique individual that each of us is.

    Easy to Forget the Journey…

    There are many voices in our culture that seem to imply that the best way to be strong and advance in life is to forget all about the past, and to live in a way that just moves forward. In a time like ours, this is a very seductive message. As wave after wave of change washes over us, it’s very easy to feel disconnected from our personal past, with all it’s pain, courage and hard-won clarity.

    As we celebrate the end of a decade, it may be valuable to think back on ourselves of ten years ago. Given the fast pace of events, can we even remember ourselves and the world as it was in 2010? Yet, it’s not that long ago!

    Often that past experience of ourselves, and of how we have gotten through the demanding experiences of the past can be an important part of our resilient core as we approach the future.

    Resiliency Through Affirming Who We Are

    As the American Psychological Association tells us that,

    [r]esilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress …. It means “bouncing back” from difficult experiences.

    APA Website

    We face a world now where there is a continual onslaught of anxiety and stress from ongoing, relentless change. We need to be able to “bounce back” in the face of continual stressors. One important way to gain such resilience is through connecting with our past in meaningful, healing ways. These often involve connecting with out past experiences in life events such as past major life transitions. Depth case studies can be centrally important in helping us to access these resources for resilience, contained deep within ourselves.

    In our post next week, I’ll be continuing our exploration of resources within ourselves that contribute to our resilience.

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