Resilience and the Consequence of War.

We live in a society where we are a captive audience to a barrage of advertisements that condition us to think that if you look this way, or wear this makeup, or drive this car,  you can magically reclaim your youth.  This kind of subliminal conditioning distorts our sense of reality.  And it’s even more toxic when we become socially isolated.  Social media and targeted advertisements were happening long before the pandemic but as we learned, when the world suddenly shuts down, your world becomes smaller. And as a result, your mind, body, spirit and imagination have less opportunities to develop and grow.  The pandemic was in many ways, a deep dive in learning how to flourish with limited human currency but an oversaturation of virtual ones.  

The pandemic is just one example of how a natural disaster can upend your plans for the future. Natural disasters, Wars, famines, and economic downturns have been around since the beginning of time. Had we not experienced them, we wouldn’t have adapted as a species. I remember an Interview I had with a 94 year old in 2013 during an intergenerational project, When I asked her about her outlook, on life, She replied that she had reached the age that she wanted to learn any thing new. She went on to say, "There is so much in the world that has changed and its changing more rapidly than I can keep up with--Some of it is good and a lot of it is bad, but it's different. And the Bad could develop into something better and the good could go Down hill, I've seen this sort of thing happen. I think back to the Great Depression because it had very much of an influence on my life. My Dad, who was the apple of my eye died at that time. And then the next thing was Ww2. broke out. And from there we managed to move on into a more prosperous time. Too Bad to have to think of it as a consequence of war but its what happened."

These conversations we need to have more of. They are the very interactions that become our ancestral memory.  They empower us by remembering how our ancestors not only survived these events in History, but evolved and adapted to meet new challenges.  We are products of their resilience for they make up our DNA.   Research suggests that resilience has been genetically passed down through the ages, (not engineered) and that these traits can be learned.  We are all golden by nature..