To carry on carrying on

What is it that makes humans, sometimes in spite of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles placed before them, manage, in time, to regain and maintain their composure day after day, enough to carry on carrying on?

We have all come across examples of people being floored by a major personal catastrophe only to regain – granted often after considerable time – the inner gumption to get on with it.

I have had close friends who have unexpectedly been thrust into the modern equivalent of the Roman Coliseum with life-threatening illnesses the likes of which, at least to outsiders like me, would incapacitate even the heartiest.

Yet this is not at all the reaction I have witnessed in many of these people. Instead of capitulation, these individuals somehow apparently struggle for and garner even greater personal capabilities. Leads one to wonder how this can occur.

So I observed David last weekend. He is a middle-aged, retired professional, by every description a committed athlete filled with joie de vivre and the kind of optimism that accompanies a lifetime of good health and success.

His story has been told millions of times before. Just wanting his family doctor to look into a lump on his neck, he was served with the scariest diagnosis anyone could have imagined. Instantly, life as David had known it was altered, forever.

Almost immediately, he subjected himself to the array of indignities that anonymous oncologists lay out before people like him, people with a diagnosis barely more dire than the onslaught of lesser evils which specialists refer to as limited treatment options.

Over the next while, life, or existence for that matter, must take on an unrecognisable texture and colour for people like David, as if playing a game where morbidity and survival became interrelated opponents.

Gone is the physical sanity we all take for granted every millisecond of our healthy existence, tossed up in the air, an air choked of everything except the most unsavoury of choices.

And yet David did exactly what most end up doing. His acceptance of treatment may well have been the first outright manifestation of defiance, the early unfolding of the resilience in him posing as an exercise in self-preservation, the one thing to which everyone can somehow manage to relate.

But there is a much deeper, much more profound appearance of inner strength that precedes allying oneself with the masters of surgical, radiological and pharmaceutical arsenals. Maybe resilience doesn’t in fact have any specific moment of emergence at all.

Maybe it’s just a silent lifelong partner that plays the temporary roles cast for it, having its brief onstage moments, cameo parts for the most, alongside

bravery, courage and steadfastness; life’s figurants in a manner of speaking.

That would mean that David’s acceptance of treatment has less to do with resignation than wanting to regain as much of his former strength as possible; resilience in action, the manifestation of a constant determination to rise above imminent dangers and get on with it as before.

Yet strength in the face of treatment is just one of many of resilience’s facets; strength facing people is another. Pseudo experts abound, often sans expertise, armed with knowledge gleaned from rumours or clips from an electronic marketplace teeming with misinformation.

And there is the insistence, people’s insistence upon doing what seems best, regardless of the consequences.

Help is bantered about unabashedly until it appears nearly dismissive, masquerading as attempts at companionship, caring, even support, although it may not always feel like it. Confoundedly frustrating as some situations have been, the Davids we all know nearly always rebound.

Resilience shows in the acceptance of eating when there is neither taste to enjoy nor saliva to swallow. Resilience shows in putting on make-up even when the head is bald, mothering when there is only limited future or letting something make you laugh so hard you could nearly forget your circumstances.

By sharing slivers of their lives, those among us who constantly demonstrate their capacity to overcome and get back on their own tracks afford us an opportunity to peer into, or at least get the impression of peering into, the basic components that make them operate.

Or is it the way we all operate, really?