This post comes after having worked with a friend who had lost what seemed to be a secure job recently and was left with the shock and hurt. I hope that this will be a strengthening experience for him and for anyone out there who shares the experience.

What came up in the conversation was that we tend to see our problems as objects that are separate from us and which need to be tackled. But as we are for ever part of a system that binds our choices with our problems and our solutions, we can never accurately predict what will be the consequence of our actions. We can hope and believe and plan, but never accurately predict. What’s left for us is to keep on making choices and develop the resilience that will allow us to withstand the surprises that await us and absorb the worst without losing our core qualities.

The paradox is that in order to be able to recover readily we need to allow some shock in; it is only when we engage with what’s difficult that we can absorb it and walk away unbroken. Becoming resilient means we integrate whatever we find difficult into our core.

To me there are two elements in understanding resilience. First to accept that by and large we will for ever remain ignorant of the future. Because we are never isolated but a part of a system and we don’t know how far-reaching it is and what knock-on effect any change in one part of the system will have on the rest.

I see our system, which is also our context, as our emotions, education, beliefs, physique, family, friends, religion, identities, society and the physical world.

Second thing is to try and widen the way we interacted with the world, this means having a choice of responses. Easier said than done, but possible; it takes awareness and requires the willingness to have new experiences because new experiences allow us to develop new skills and new concepts that can be extended and adapted constantly to reality. The more flexibility we allow ourselves when we interact with the world, the larger our context becomes and the larger our context is, the more resilient we become.

So how do we widen our interaction with the world? I hope to develop this further in the next post. In the meanwhile I’d like to share Suzuki Roshi’s words:

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.”

And to me a beginner’s mind is a mind that accepts some level of not knowing.

More at www.gileadyeffett.wordpress.com