Resilience

“ The building, or coming back to a normal state, is slow; it takes time, patience and will power, but it can be done. I know. I have been through the mill, and I pass the word to you and try to stir you to be up and doing, even as I did.
Your nerves can be steadied, your thoughts uplifted, your health restored, your ambition re-established, your normality fixed.
Smiles, love and content are to be yours. Poise, efficiency, peace, your blessings. Health, happiness and hope your dividends. ”

“ And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.
'Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help—may even be hindrances—to a civilized man. And in a state of physical balance and security, power, intellectual as well as physical, would be out of place. ”

“ One could almost hear the universal sigh of relief which went up from humanity. To relief succeeded confidence—so quickly does the human spirit recover like an elastic spring, when pressure is released. ”

“ Neither exaltation nor depression is its normal state, but the crisis to note its progress,—the predominance of its strength or weakness. How often are we obliged to confront our faults again after we thought to have conquered them forever, yet each time rising with a more resolute purpose, learning that it is only by continued effort the soul gains the height where she can resist reacting influences, overcome every weakness and silence every doubt. ”

“ Blended with this is relief—the relief of a general who has brought a difficult campaign to a successful end, or a member of a forlorn hope who finds that the danger is over and that he is still alive. ”

“ Accident and then exigency seemed the forces at work to this extraordinary effect; the play of energies as free and planless as those that force the forest from the soil to the sky; and then the fierce struggle for survival, with the stronger life persisting over the deformity, the mutilation, the destruction, the decay of the weaker. ”

“ What a singular feature does the whole system expose, and how fond of the world must they be who practise it! Who can tell whether this House of Recovery does not creep in among the fading hopes of the death-bed, and if, among the last farewells of parting life, some thoughts of that last chance are not present to the sick man’s mind? ”

“ But some cry, ‘Ay, but this habit of disregarding misfortunes blunts your wills when you have the power to relieve them.’ Relieve! was ever such delusion? What can we relieve in the vast mass of human misfortunes? As well might we take a drop from the ocean, and cry, ‘Ha, ha! we have lessened the sea!’ What are even your public charities? what your best institutions? How few of the multitude are relieved at all; how few of that few relieved permanently! Men die, suffer, starve just as soon, and just as numerously ”

“ To begin with, how can things so insecure as the successful experiences of this world afford a stable anchorage? A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. In the healthiest and most prosperous existence, how many links of illness, danger, and disaster are always interposed? ”

“ No matter how grim it may appear, let us look it straight in the eye. For fear will weaken us. Let us not lose confidence in our­selves. As we said earlier, resiliency is our greatest asset as a people. ”

“ Again, you may have strength to run—that is to say, there is power waiting for you for all the great crises of your lives which call for special, though it may be brief, exertion. Such crises will come to each of you, in sorrow, work, difficulty, hard conflicts. Moments will be sprung upon you without warning, in which you will feel that years hang on the issue of an instant. Great tasks will be clashed down before you unexpectedly which will demand the gathering together of all your power. ”

“ Probably all great suffering comes accompanied with a reserve of strength or with a power of resistance which may even spring from weakness, but which invests the sufferer with courage, and perhaps, too, with hope, to meet it. ”

“ Those who bring it to bear upon human conditions heal themselves and others, they change their environment and turn a lamp to the feet of the struggling, they help all to get health, wealth, love and success, not tomorrow nor next year but here and now. ”

“ Tonight, tomorrow, may begin the fierce blasts that will sweep away the last vestige of what was strength, or pride, or beauty, or power, or understanding. Even now the winds of disaster may be whining under your door. A good body is something, a brain is more. ”

“ Where there is sterling faith and uncompromising purity there is health, there is success, there is power. In such a one, disease, failure, and disaster can find no lodgment, for there is nothing on which they can feed. ”

“ Change of any kind has ever been abhorrent to her spirit, and those were days when nothing was permanent save death. Order and tranquillity are essential to her well-being; and the world, seething with strife, exulted in its own measureless confusion. ”

“ With the return to more normal conditions, with the improvement of the means of travel and communication, with the lifting of the deadening weight of fear and care and the growing receptivity of the masses schooled in adversity and groping for the means of ultimate salvation, opportunities without number and unprecedented in their significance, present themselves to those whose privilege and obligation it is to pave the way for the launching of the succeeding stage of their historic and ever unfolding task. ”

“ They endure what they thought they could not endure. In crisis times the muscles secure extra strength, the mind secures extra alertness, and the spirit secures extra power either to do or to bear. These reserves must be of God’s giving, whether they lie ready in the nature always, or are special gifts sent direct to help us in the troublous hours. ”

“ If we can pull through, and we are proposing to make every effort, we shall be content, and we are content, even at the present crisis, to think that it is not altogether impossible that very earnest efforts are being made to expedite our relief, and so alleviate our distress. ”

“ It was his problem how to drop into one scale or the other scale of the childish balances some almost imponderable weight, as when good tidings arriving save a life, as when bad news held back saves a life; as when the removal of an injustice from a sensitive spirit saves a life; as when the healing of a wound of the mind in the very extremity saves a life. ”

“ Whatever may betide or the future have in store for the little work so simply commenced, so humbly carried on, merely a helper with no thought of leadership, it bears along with it the memories of pain assuaged, hope revived, endeavor strengthened, and lives saved. ”

“ These conditions surrounded them with an atmosphere of depressing poverty, fear, and hopeless endurance, if not of despair. They have not felt the stimulating habitual influence of hope, of courage, of enterprise. ”

“ Our particular lives seem of such fortune and confident strength and durability as piers of solid rock thrown forward into the tide of circumstance. When every other path would fail, with singular and unerring confidence we advance on our particular course. What risks we run! famine and fire and pestilence, and the thousand forms of a cruel fate,—and yet every man lives till he—dies. ”

“ It was there that they would go to begin life anew and to mend the faith that had been broken. He would till the land and drive the plough and take up the common round of life again—a life free from action as from failure, into which no changes might ring despair. ”

“ The thought of having endured those thirty-five years of service, of having lived through all those hardships, all those snows, all those winds, all the mud, hunger, thirst, and privation, and having come home in health—the thought fills him with pride. ”

“ Rest!—how strongly, day by day, does the desire for rest grow upon the human heart! We begin life—how buoyant, how hopeful! difficulties but bring out a healthful exertion, and obstacles stimulate by the resources they call into action. ”

“ The nature of the effect is always in accordance with the nature of the cause. What one lives in his invisible, thought world, he is continually actualizing in his visible, material world. If he would have any conditions different in the latter he must make the necessary change in the former. A clear realization of this great fact would bring success to thousands of men and women who all about us are now in the depths of despair. It would bring health, abounding health and strength to thousands now diseased and suffering. ”

“ Here is where the sufferer must exert his will power, change completely his mental and physical habits and his surroundings. Occupation, changed habits, taking in of confidence, faith and courage thoughts—these changes are necessary to the victim of melancholia, or he will shatter on the danger rocks and go to pieces. ”

“ As we know the true might of the intellect by the rich resources and patient strength with which it redeems a failure, so do we prove the elevation of the soul by its courageous return into light—its instinctive rebound into higher air—after some error that has darked its vision and soiled its plumes. ”

“ Work, food, and sleep, all life reduced to its bare essentials, uncomplex, honest, healthy. They were strong, these men, with the strength of the soil they worked, in touch with the essential things, back again to the starting point of civilisation, coarse, vital, real, and sane. ”

“ The same reflection, coupled with that of our own incurability and our own {167} constant liability to be stricken down with hopeless and painful malady, should surely lead us to recognise the duty of helping some among the thousands who have not only lost health, but with it the means of maintaining life, and, more sadly still, the hope of restoration to former strength, or even temporary recovery. ”

“ And the necessity for the discipline of affliction and disappointment, even as it explains the smaller troubles, explains also the greatest. Let ill be heaped on ill, disaster on disaster, disease on bereavement, misery on sorrow, while stage by stage the life goes down into deeper circles of gloom and pain, it may acquire, it will acquire, if faith and faithfulness towards God remain, massiveness, strength and dignity for the highest spiritual service. ”

“ Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that these things that I have been saying, or trying to say, about the flexibility and the potentiality of the human race in its present crisis, in its present struggle to maintain and add to its glory on the earth, are all beyond the range of possibility, and the present strength of manhood. ”

“ When the suspense fills you with pain you build stone walls and dig earth for relief. Others have stood where you stand today, and have felt as you feel; and another relief has been offered them, and they have taken it.
“When the day has come when they have seen the path in which they might walk, they have not the strength to follow it. Habits have fastened on them from which nothing but death can free them ”

“ Their own sanity, their self-reliance and faith in the future made them ready to rebound from fortune’s sudden blow. But in the wearying days that followed in the wake of the first efforts at recuperation, the adventurous spirit flagged under the strain and the ugliness of life. ”

“ For many years I have worked amongst you, in sickness and in health, in prosperity and adversity, and your welfare is dear to me. Sometimes I have felt discouraged, acutely sensible of failure and disappointment. ”

“ Gone was the old tranquillity, vanished the old ennui. A new race, struggling amid terrible hardships, fought bravely and bitterly for the preservation of an existence they had formerly despised. Man found his life filled with toil, sweetened by peril, checked by manifold disasters, and was deluded into cherishing at any cost that which was so painful to sustain. ”

“ How can we fail, amid the tumult of our common cares, to feel at times the hush of that far-off tranquillity? When our life is most commonplace, when we are ill or weary in city streets, we can remember the clouds upon the mountains we have seen, the sound of innumerable waterfalls, and the scent of countless flowers. ”

“ And it is in after years, when the pain of severance from old friends and habits is healed, and when the discomfort of adapting ourselves to a new kind of life is replaced by peaceful and docile resignation to new conditions, that we reach the clear perception that the changes we resented have in point of fact rendered harmless the seeds of fresh disaster, and rescued us from the results of long bad government. ”

“ But such things come and such things go: after eighty there are ups and downs; people fading away one week, bloom out pleasantly the next, and resiliency is not at all a patent belonging to youth alone. ”

“ We felt that our position was critical, for at any moment our capricious masters might turn upon us, and we might have to fight for our lives. We had cause, however, to be grateful to Heaven for our preservation, and for the many dangers we had gone through safely, as also that we had been enabled to retain our health, which, in spite of the heat and fatigue we endured, was excellent. ”

“ You say you are chained by circumstances; you cry out for better opportunities, for a wider scope, for improved physical conditions, and perhaps you inwardly curse the fate that binds you hand and foot. ”