Resilience and the human spirit

The importance of hope. 2017

This is an essay about the human spirit.  More particularly, the resilience of the human spirit.  How, when faced with adversity, with difficult situations, we humans have a marvelous potential for stepping up, facing down the foe, and moving on, or at least moving through.

What started me thinking on this was when very recently, the grandfather of a dear friend passed away. I knew him as Pup, the name my friend called him. He was 91 years old and his last years were mired in depression and other insidious health challenges.

His early years though, were a different story.  A farmer in the south east of South Australia, vital, vibrant, independent, full of life and energy; he was born, grew up and lived his life on the land.  He enjoyed a long and happy marriage to his sweetheart, Pam, and the love and respect of his four children, eight grandchildren and one great grandchild. And I’m not talking the removed, at a distance love and respect variety of love and respect.  I’m talking calling in, spending time, enjoying each other’s company, helping out brand of love and respect.   

By all accounts, for most of his life, he was the life of the party; Saturday night dances at the local hall, back in the day, always first on the dance floor; playing tennis; playing cards and generally having a fine old time with a wide circle of close and lifelong friends.

Of course, all that was coupled with work on the farm and all that goes with running such a venture.  It was a farm inherited from his parents and so it was his whole life for a very long time. 

I guess I met him and Pam, his much loved partner for life, my friend’s grandmother about twenty or so years ago.  So, Pup would have been about 70.  They had sold the farm and moved to town to enjoy their retirement years.  And enjoy them they did, this very social pair.

But time has a habit of marching on.  It is relentless.  It’s unforgiving.  And with time, despite the wonders of modern medicine, the body ages, the mind wanders, the world contracts.  And so it was for Pup.  Although his heart was strong, the rest of his body started to fall apart.  He was doused in depression.  His world became a series of doctor’s visits, hospital visits and, after a fall, the move into aged care.  And that never ends well.  In the end he was just waiting to die.

Pup's was a fairly depressing end to a life well lived.  The human spirit being what it is of course, with time and support from those who are close, the sad end will be forgotten and the life well lived will be remembered and celebrated. 

That is resilience.  And resilience is how I would describe the fact that we, creatures that know that there is only one possible culmination to this life, are able to function on a daily basis, to strive for a better life, to want a better life for our children, all the time knowing that our time is finite.  Is that what drives us?  Is it the finiteness that does the driving?

Life is precious.  We know that.  We have just one; and the human spirit is incorrigible.  Add some time and it somehow gets us through the grief of losing a loved one.  It allows us to endure situations that we might not think ourselves capable. 

I read recently of a young man, now 25 years old.  His name is Nisho.  He is the product of a free (Western) education, he likes to watch TV, he has a mobile phone.  He has a wife and two children.  He works hard for little monetary reward. He loves football.  He strives to improve his lot.  He likes to kick back with his friends.  Sounds kind of typical.

Nisho lives in Ifo, he is a refugee in the biggest refugee camp system in the world, near Dadaab in Kenya.  Ifo was established in 1991, the year that Nisho was born, enroute to that place, his parents fleeing civil war in central Somalia.  His work is as a porter in the shady market economy of the camp.  Shady in the way of not-exactly-legal, not the leafy kind of shady.  So Nisho’s whole life has been in the camp.  His story and the story of eight other individuals are told in the book City of Thorns by Ben Rawlence.  All are waiting for a safer, friendlier place.  In the meantime life goes on.  And the human spirit is incorrigible.  There is always something to hope for, however tenuous a thread that hope might hang on.  Hope gives Nisho resilience.

The world is full of stories of resilience.  They are stories of ordinary people, facing their hurdles.  As we are all ordinary people, facing our own hurdles,  greater or lesser.  All people.  Each a person making up the greater collective.  Fundamentally the same.  Born into a life over which most of us have very little control.  Pup, born to be a farmer, survived and remembered by his loving family.  Nisho, born already a refugee.  Neither path chosen.  But, in the words of Maya Angelou, “we are more alike, my friends, that we are unalike”.

When I look at the strength of the human spirit, I can only be inspired.  Hope gives us resilience, and resilience gives us hope.