Resilience in the Face of Adversity
Today’s post is focusing on the concept of Resilience and how one (in this case me) can use it to handle adversity when it slaps you hard in the face! My hope is that by writing about it and my recent experience that this blog post will inspire you to see the value of Resilience and perhaps embrace it when hard times confront you.
I also want to preface this by noting that given all the natural disasters that people in our world are experiencing, the loss of life from hate crime related shootings and people living through and in war torn countries and civil violence, I know the adversity that I’m living through as my husband and I strive to make our dream a reality, is trivial in comparison. That said, it doesn’t mean it is any less hard, it just means that in comparison we are still lucky. Perhaps, this acknowledgement is the first step towards Resilience.
Recap of the Palisade Posh Journey
If you are a regular follower of my blog, you know that for the last year or so I’ve been actively working toward making my dream of Palisade Posh a reality. After our youngest daughter graduated from high school, the first step was making the decision to sell our house. That made, we set to work getting it ready to sell and moved all our worldly possessions to storage, where they have remained for over a year! Sadly, we were a little slow on getting the house on the market and we missed the real estate boom that saw houses like ours go for over a million in less than a week. It took us four months and the changing of realtors to final get our house sold, and it did NOT sell for a million!
We’ve been sharing a two-bedroom apartment (900 sq feet) with our two adult and two springer spaniels. This roommate situation was only supposed to be for a few months. It’s now been over a year and we are still bunking with them! As we move toward the purchase of our dream property, this apartment is now filled with all our daughters’ possessions, most of which are still in boxes, as well as the few things Andy and I brought to the apartment which are also now in boxes. Currently, the apartment is a maze of boxes with Andy and I each sharing a bedroom with a daughter and sleeping on the floor (we took our beds apart last weekend and moved things around so each daughter now has her own room). This latter endeavor was in preparation for our September 1st closing date.
Adversity
As noted above, we were scheduled to close the beginning of September. Prior to that, we were supposed to close on August 25th, but due to complications by Ute Water the closing date was pushed back to the first of September. The Ute Water Conservancy District, is the only water company in the Grand Valley area. As such, it has a monopoly on water services where Palisade is located. Because Andy and I are the buyers of the property, we do not have direct contact with Ute Water, the seller does, however their actions have a direct impact on us and in this case a negative impact. True we have had other setbacks in the process of purchasing this property but collectively, every group of individuals thus far did coalesce in the end to move the subdivision of the property forward. That is until now; Ute Water’s actions and response time is a stark contrast to anything we’ve experienced thus far. First there was a delay in checking the water pressure, that came back fine, but then they said they needed to double check the pressure a little further a far because there had been so many other subdivisions of properties in the East Orchard Mesa area in the last year. Their findings stated that the seller would need to put in a larger water line (this is my understanding of the report) to support additional water usage. This made sense until they said where this work needed to be done, several roads away from the property in an area that for the life of us we can’t figure out why that location would impact the property of the seller? It is nowhere near the property! Our current theory is that Ute Water needed to get this work done and they saw an opportunity to make someone else pay for it. This is not a pleasant realization if it is true as it goes against the community mentality that is synonymous with Palisade. The seller acquiesced and the work began. However, there were more delays, and the Friday before September 1st the work was finally completed. All that Ute Water needed to do now was provide the seller with an invoice so he could pay his share and present the receipt to the county and they would release their approval of the subdivide. Once that was done, the rest of the closing steps would fall into place. Friday, the seller called Ute to get the invoice and he got no response. Now the clock was ticking…. He called again Monday morning, still no response… finally near the end of the day Ute Water told him that they ‘should’ be able to get him an invoice by Friday, September 1st. With that not so firm response, our closing date was canceled, and we currently (as of the writing of this blog post) have no idea when we will close on this property.
The above news broke when I was in Grand Junction, which means I was alone while Andy was back in Denver. I’ve been making the four-hour commute for three weeks (as of the writing of this post) and it now appears I will be continuing this commute for an unspecified time. This knowledge and the fact that I was alone made the Ute Water news and yet another delay in closing hard to take.
Resilience
And so I come to my point about Resilience. The above outlines the adversity that hit me hard in the face and pretty much knocked me on my ass (pardon my French). Even though I know there is a whole lot of other worse things going on in the world, it still hurt. So, what to do about it? What to do about a situation I have absolutely no control over, how do I find positivity and joy after a disappoint such as this?
The first thing I did was acknowledge the fact that it was a disappointment and put it in context to my life as a whole. I did this by first reminding myself what I still had, for me that included my health, my family who were safe back in Denver, we still had a roof over our heads, I have a new job that surrounds me with kind people, and the list went on. The next thing I did was mentally list off all the people, experiences, and things that I was grateful for, which might sound similar to the first step, but it is the mental acknowledgement of being grateful that sets it apart. I started this practice a few months ago and is how I begin every morning. Doing these two things started to put me in a better state of mind. I was still sad and depressed, but I was moving (mentally) in a better direction. The next thing I did was to ask myself, what can I learn from this experience? This was key to finding my resilience.
Number one: no matter how well you plan and map out complicated logistics etc… things can happen that thwart those plans so don’t have a death grip on your game plan. Loosen that grip and that will allow room for adaptability.
Number two: things work differently in a rural community than in the big city and if I’m going to be a positive contributing member of this community I need to learn to deal with this change of pace. Being more cognizant of this, is going to help me be less uptight about future timelines, for example, the one involving the renovation of the house, or the building of the Airbnb, even the build out of the farm itself. Just because I want something to occur in a timely manner doesn’t mean it will, and it probably won’t. If I want to live a joyful life, I need to learn to be okay with that realization. Things will get done and I need to be flexible on the time it takes. Inflexibility can lead to unhappiness and frustration, a keyway to avoid this is to let go of self-imposed rigidity and embrace flexibility.
Number three: it’s not personal. Understanding this concept came from a book I read called “No-Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners” written by Noah Rasheta. In the book Rasheta uses the example of a person being in a boat and the boat being hit by a log that was in the stream. If you were the person in the boat, you wouldn’t take it personally that the log hit your boat as it just happened and the log had no malice intend, so why would you take it personally when something in life occurs? Sometimes things happen in life that we have no control over. Thinking about my situation in that way, helped take the hurt away and with that gone I continued to put the situation in clearer perspective. As a side note: I purchased this book years ago on Amazon, now I think it is only available via audiobook – I’ve included a link for it at the end of this blog post. Rasheta also does a podcast on Secular Buddhism.
Number four: How do I move forward? Accept the fact that I will be commuting for a few more weeks and get over it. Realize and remember that the seller wants to sell his property and close as quickly as we do and know that we will close, eventually. Be grateful that we have an amazing realtor that is working hard to help us get to Palisade. Focus on what I can do while I wait… I can get going on preparing for my art show in November; since Andy and I will still be in Denver when the Gem and Mineral show takes place, I can go to it and pick up a few strains of freshwater pearls to make this years’ Mala. I can enjoy a few more weeks living with my daughters (depending on the day this can either be a blessing or a curse but I will focus on it being a blessing). Seeing and appreciating the beautiful young women they have become is wonderful. Knowing that they are going to be AOK living on their own and that they will indeed have each other’s backs when they are confronted with adversity is also a good feeling.
Number five: We have choices in life. I can choose to let this set back bring me down OR I can choose to turn it into an opportunity to grow as a person, to learn from it and to continue to move forward. I can dwell on what isn’t, or I can learn to work with what is and know that it will all work out in the end…. If it hasn’t worked out, then it is not the end. Choosing to grow from adversity exemplifies the meaning of resilience. This is the path I choose. Writing about my experience and what I learned from it, will perhaps give you an opportunity to see the value and the power of being resilient. That is my hope for this blog post and for you as my reader!
Postscript: If you are curious about the Buddhist philosophy and how you can use it’s teaches to become a better whatever you already are, I highly recommend this book. It is an easy read and approaches Buddhism not as a religious but more as it relates to secular life. I’m what is often referred to as a ‘Cradle Catholic’ and I found this book helped me in my pursuit of living a more joyful life.
No-Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners: Clear Answers to Burning Questions about Buddhist Teachings
By Naoh Rasheta
