Bounce-back

As I write on Monday afternoon, the shadows of our yews dance on the window blinds of my home office. It’s a marvel, how they’ve bounced back—literally—from last week’s heavy, wet snow. Seven days ago, their evergreen boughs bowed low. Today, they reach again to the sun, trembling in a light breeze.

It’s cold outside, in the teens when I woke up this morning. Not as cold as one friend reports on FaceBook from her home in Montana, where Arctic temperatures hover well below zero. That, I could not tolerate, literally. This cold blast I can live with, at least temporarily. And there is my annual source of relief in mid-January: daylight is already becoming noticeably longer.

Often, these days, I think about how the only thing that is real is what is happening right now, in the moment. One day, we were digging out from more than a foot of snow. A few days later, the sun is bright and our hardy New England evergreens have recovered. A lesson in resilience.

Yews have evolved over millennia to grow springy boughs that aren’t broken by heavy snow. For us humans, resilience must be learned. Whether in response to chronic disease or dark news or whatever else is weighing on our hearts, resilience requires cultivation, attentiveness, experience. It takes practice. It takes patience. It takes living in the present and maintaining a long perspective.

But it is not a passive posture. If there is anything I’ve learned from living with scleroderma for more than 40 years, it’s that resilience also requires a willingness to face the present with a clear understanding of what is happening, what’s at stake, and how best to respond. For me, resilience is also a matter of faith and of trusting my intuition when facts and answers are murky.

That is not to say that I always feel resilient. I have to work at it, every day. There is much in this world that weighs heavily on my heart. All the more reason to sit back at my desk and study the pattern of dancing yew boughs on my window blinds on a cold and sunny Monday afternoon.

Evelyn Herwitz blogs weekly about living fully with chronic disease, the inside of baseballs, turtles and frogs, J.S. Bach, the meaning of life and whatever else she happens to be thinking about at livingwithscleroderma.com. Please view Privacy Policy here.