Tag: resilience

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#127 Coffee with John

I like the concept of lessons hidden within us, waiting for us to discover them. Life’s circumstances—marriage, sickness, loss, a new job, divorce, new relationships—lead us to these explorations, whether or not we are ready to unearth anything.

The lessons these situations bring we often perceive them as points of arrival. After the battle in the arena, we wipe the dirt off our faces and feel we have arrived, with the smugness of wisdom shining through. We should bask and feel proud of discovering ourselves in the process.

Conquering the ups and downs of life requires courage and bravery. It takes self-awareness to embrace our challenges and recognize what we have learned. However, we often forget that there is no final destination. Life is a continuous journey, with the next lesson always around the corner.

Perhaps we reach a point where past lessons carry us forward, allowing us to coast for a while until the next few stops. But soon, a new point of departure will take us in a different direction. Will we embrace our new path? Will we be open to the new challenge? Will we have the endurance to free our hearts and minds from the past and meet the new future? Will we shed the aspects of our lives that hold us back? Will old patterns challenged by new paths prevail?

As I continue to meet people through my “Coffee with John” initiative, I can affirm that the answer to most of these questions is a resounding yes. Yes, we can continue to grow. Yes, we can shed beliefs that hold us back. Yes, we can embrace what seems like a treacherous road to find strength, courage, and a better version of ourselves around the corner.

The power of the human spirit is boundless and filled with infinite strength, as my coffee mate for this Coffee with John round exemplifies. Her story is hers to share, but she represents strength, resilience, and hope.

We are not alone in navigating life’s shifting roads. Our struggles, challenges, and victories are ours, but the road is filled with many who have traversed similar paths. This is where the power of sharing our stories, whether in a group setting, over a cup of coffee with a new friend, in a writing practice, or in any other form, becomes key.

Share your story to empower and give voice to fellow pilgrims.

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#108 Coffee with John: Resilience

Get over it!

So you lost your mother when you were young, get over it. You broke up with your partner a year ago and you are still talking about it, get over it! You are not happy with your job and all you do is complain about it, get over it! You are angry because you didn’t get this or that, get over it! GET. OVER.IT!

Whatever the situation or difficult circumstances, my default attitude/motto was “get over it and move on.”This attitude served me well in dealing with loss and the inevitable moves, heartaches, new beginnings, and gain and losses that challenges all of us at some point in our lives

I mistook this as resilience. This Coffee with John meeting had me reexamine this guiding principle so central to my core. If we look at the definition of the word in an initial Google search, we come up with: “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.”

Strictly speaking, I was not mistaken in conflating “get over it” with resilience. But we need a more expansive definition, one that includes empathy, forgiveness, vulnerability, patience, joy, and compassion. We mistake neutrality, ignoring emotions, pushing people away, and closing our hearts with being tough.

On the contrary, toughness/resilience takes courage to sit with the uncomfortable, let go of anger, feel the emotions, face the hard conversations, ask for assistance, and open our hearts to kindness and love: as much as for yourselves and others experiencing some sort of calamity.

Don’t get me wrong though. What I can’t tolerate still is the victim mentality. I firmly believe losses, traumas, hardships, and challenges do not control us. We can take the reins. Instead of “get over it” let’s turn that into “how can this serve me and help my journey in becoming a better person for ourselves and those around us.” Make a loss a path for healing in a way that is compassionate.

While I can’t speak of how my coffee mate for CWJ#08 handles adversity, what I see as an outsider is an individual that has turned her life at various points, facing insurmountable hardships and challenges with laughter, humor, and fearless tenacity. She has overcome language barriers, bounced back and surpassed personal and family sagas, and started a new life in the United States after enjoying a successful naval career in her native Colombia. She continues forging ahead taking on new challenges and exploring new paths, including acting and modeling, with admirable grit.

We can all take inspiration from those around us on how they have internalized resilience.

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#99 Coffee with John

What do I do with the stories people tell me over these meetings? What do I write about after each meeting?

Since those questions have come up on some of my last meetups, let me address them as part of this entry.

Honestly, aside from perhaps informing my write-ups and giving me a window into those joining me, rarely do I write directly about what people tell me. Also, while there are exemptions, rarely do identify my coffee mates

No matter the subject, I treat the conversations as an intimate moment shared among two people. I don’t interview people nor do I feel I am in the position to share other people’s stories.

So what do I write about? Sometimes is about a feeling, an idea sparked by the conversation, or a reflection ignited by my feelings and the experience at the moment. Sometimes the ideas come immediately, and other times,it takes me sitting on and punctuating what I got out of the interaction.

Ultimately, I want to focus on a positive theme/concept inspired by the meeting.

Speaking of, the theme that jumped out to me the most from CWJ#99 is that of resilience. I am always amazed to hear how people have overcome the cards that life has given them.

Stressful, traumatic, and painful events can mark you. Those experiences can lead us to a destructive path or a place where we can’t move from, rendering us stuck in unhealthy patterns, relationships, and emotions of fear, anxiety and stress.

The challenge is always to turn adversity into a beautiful question or quest that goes beyond ourselves, fear, sadness, resentment, guilt, anxiety, or whatever negative emotions we carry into different aspects of our lives.

With all the trauma brought upon the pandemic, that is a challenge we as a collective may be wrestling with as we move into a new norm. I am not going to offer any answers. What I will say is that I hope part of the answers include a path full of discoveries where we can all explore the many big and small possibilities life offers each day, leading to better relations with others and ourselves.

For inspiration, as we all look for a path of resilience, I encourage you to check out the self-published book of poetry (currently only available in Spanish) by Kurma Murrain, my coffee mate for this round. Also, you may check out her blog to learn more about this Colombian native making a mark as a poet and community advocate in Charlotte, NC.

My hope is that poetry and discovering your voice and the artist within you become part of your healing and tools of resilience.

Cafe, amor y sueño americano