Exercise Your Resiliency Muscles

You’ll need them to power through the changes coming your way.

Photo by Israel Gil on Unsplash

I envy those people who seem to cruise through life, eternally happy, surfing waves of success from one crest to the next. Maybe it’s just for show and their ride is not as smooth as it looks. I only know my own life journey is more like a ride on a kiddy roller coaster – mostly small ups, small downs – nothing too thrilling or too gut-wrenching.

These days my downs seldom last more than a couple days – driven sometimes by excess humidity but more often by my brain chemistry, modified enough by medication to keep a ceiling on the highs and a floor beneath the lows. A lifetime of experience has taught me that the lows don’t last forever. Some call this wisdom. I call it resilience.

I’ve had years of practice to develop sturdy, well-toned resilience muscles.

Strong resilience muscles are good to have in times of change, and the autumn of life is rife with them. One worn-out stereotype of older adults has us as stubborn, unyielding souls who reject the newfangled and resist change in any form. I meet more characters like that in books than in real life. As Star Trek fans will attest, resistance is futile.

A better approach is to transition into change by moving gradually from what is now to what will be. We can look forward to multiple transitions in that period that comes after our careers wrap up. We transition from working to not-working, of course, but also we may also transition to a new home, or a new locale, or to accepting the loss of companions or family members.

Beyond the Known World

In a stable world, where each generation can expect to experience much the same thing as the generation before, that would be change a-plenty. But clearly, the world today is not stable. To note just one significant factor, we are entering a unique period in human history when it comes to demography. In the words of life coach Aviva Wittenberg-Cox, “we are moving from the traditional age pyramids that humans have known for all of our existence – lots of young at the bottom and a few hardy elders at the top – to something never seen before. Squares: similar numbers of young to old.”

To be an elder in these times, therefore, means experiencing the ordinary changes of late life while also navigating terra incognita. Nobody said it was going to be easy on the frontier. So it behooves us to keep those resiliency muscles fit to power us through the tough transitions ahead.

Wittenberg-Cox suggests four rules to follow for moving resiliently through transitions:

1. Normalize the transition by naming it. (Her suggestion: Maturity. My suggestion: The AfterWork.)

2. Integrate head and heart – come to terms with your past and all you have become.

3. Enlist a team to support you. It’s difficult to make smooth transitions alone.

4. Rebrand this phase of life positively – reject ageist assumptions and their limited options.

Here are some other ideas for enhancing resilience:

• Establish what you can and cannot control and take responsibility for what you can.

• Practice mindfulness. Pay attention to what your senses are telling you.

• Identify the emotions you are feeling and learn to differentiate them.

• Write about your feelings. Journaling makes your feelings more concrete and limits their power to harm you.

• Practice gratitude. Focus on what’s good in your life – a reliable worry-buster.

• Distract yourself, to keep worries from dominating your mind.

• Help others. Get out of yourself.

A Timely Tome

Just as I was putting the finishing touches on this post, I received a well-timed message from Susan McCorkindale, a writer I follow, about her e-book, 31 Ways to Build Resilience. She offers tips, one for each day of the month, including such gems as “Let it unfold,” and “Validation is for parking.” As the mother of a grown son with autism who, through no fault of his own, found himself ensnared in the judicial system for more than a year, her knowledge of resilience is hard-won. If your resilience could use a tune-up, her e-book is a bargain at $2.99.

Keep your resilience muscles toned and strong so you’re ready to bounce back from the next surprise life throws at you. With a strong core of resilience, you can come through anything, little the worse for wear and tear.