Finding Meaning in Life’s Turbulent Times
How resilience leads to deeper understandings of ourselves
Quick Message
Hey all, happy New Year! I wanted to give a quick thank you to all who have been reading, whether it be from the beginning in 2018 or this is your first, your support means the world to me.
Last year, we switched up the newsletter based upon feedback and started sending three emails a week and bundling the emails into monthly themes. I plan to continue that same structure this year.
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As always, thank you for your continued support. Now let’s kick-off another year of living the good life.
Introduction to Monthly Theme
It’s a new year and that means for a good portion of people, New Year’s resolutions have been made and are top of mind.
Sticking to a New Year’s resolution is seldom easy and often requires effort, dedication, and determination.
But these same traits are needed at any stage of life and any time of year. Life is hard, it knocks us all to the ground one way or another.
Marcus Aurelius once reminded himself that “Nothing happens to anyone that he can't endure.” Others have experienced it and have weathered the event so we too should be able to.
In order to do so, one must dig deep, push on, and have a sense of grit about them.
As we encounter life, we must learn to stand up against its waves of adversity. Life is hard. We all struggle for different reasons. But by being able to handle ourselves in the hard times, by being able to push on through turmoil, through being uncomfortable, we give ourselves the power to be unstoppable.
In turn, we learn to be resilient.
And that’s the theme for this month. So let’s dive in.
We have two options when life gets rough, we either push on or give up.
Sometimes giving up means allowing life to just sweep us along as it wishes, events coming and going with us simply being the ship riding them.
But other times we take control of our fates and we make the conscious decision to push on, that we will not give in to the circumstances and instead plan to make it to the other side, for better or worse.
When we dig deep, when we push on during hard times, we are revealed to ourselves.
When he was a young boy, around the age of eight, Glenn Cunningham and his brother Floyd were responsible for warming the schoolhouse before others arrived. A mistake was made one morning wherein gasoline was used instead of kerosene and the furnace exploded.
Glenn would survive the explosion and subsequent burning of the schoolhouse but his brother would not.
In critical condition, Glenn had no sensation below his waist. His legs were burned, most of the skin on his knees and shins gone. When bandages were changed, muscle would be pulled up with it. It was a grueling recovery and would take months before he was in stable enough condition to return home.
In an effort to build his legs up again, Glenn would drag himself across the yard, pulling himself up with the help of a fence, and then put pressure on his legs, forcing them to help hold him up.
Eventually, he built enough strength in his legs to not only stand and walk, but run. And when he did, he discovered a passion for it.
He was dubbed the Kansas Flyer in college for his speed and spirit. Glenn would eventually go on to set the world record for the indoor mile with a finish time of four minutes and eight seconds.
“Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture,” the philosopher Iris Murdoch once said.
While Glenn had persistence and grit, and clearly was determined, it was the meaning behind the running that really pushed him. Long before he set the record for fastest indoor mile, he had made a promise with himself to live his life for his brother.
We build narratives around our experiences. We’re meaning-making machines and need a sense of narrative to our lives. It is within these stories that we create meaning and purpose as well as find the deep forces to be resilient in hard times.
When times get tough, we don’t always want to persevere. Sometimes we can’t make ourselves continue for our own sake, but the meaning behind our efforts, behind our resiliency, is the difference that pushes us to keep going, knowing we stand for something greater than ourself.
And in turn, it is these moments that reveal ourselves to us. It is in times of adversity and turmoil, when push comes to shove, that we get a glimpse of not just what we’re made of, but also what we stand for.
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how,” Nietzsche said.
Glenn would go on to be ranked first in the world and even win silver in the 1936 Olympics. His resiliency inspired people across the globe including Louis Zamperini who credited Glenn with being one of his role models and figures he imagined while being held captive as a prisoner of war in WWII.
Every moment of our lives holds an opportunity for growth and learning. Times will not always be easy, and we’ll need to dig deep. But in doing so, we not only build our strength to carry on, we get a chance to see what we’re truly made of.
And sometimes, perhaps more importantly, what we represent to ourselves and the world.
Before you go…
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Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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