You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
These days you'll likely find me, an inveterate right-hander, brushing my teeth in the bathroom with my left hand. Or else I might be busy folding my laundry in the dark, by touch, using only my fingertips to distinguish among the familiar, warmly scented clean clothes. Standing in line at the grocery store, I'm no longer idly perusing the headlines of the tabloids—instead I'm memorizing the items in the grocery cart ahead of me, and their prices, and then randomly matching them to the shopper's clothing, which goes something like this: “Quart of fat-free milk, $2.99, white shirt.” Driving home, I'm reciting the list from memory. And at yoga, I'm no longer rolling up my mat and rushing out to see a patient while others are in repose. Instead, I'm reclaiming those three minutes for meditation and reflection, allowing myself the moments to breathe deeply, in through the nose, out through the mouth.
Since I finished reading Steven Southwick and Dennis Charney's Resilience, I've been working on my physical and mental fitness, challenging my cognitive and motor dexterity, practicing mindfulness and trying to look on the bright side of things. In other words, I'm working on building my resilience. We may wonder whether resilience can be learned. Southwick and Charney believe it can. In this book they show us how to do it. The authors offer evidence that resilience can be taught and honed through rigorous training, just as one can train to strengthen the muscles of the body or acquire new technical skills. The wide array of approaches they describe range from learning adaptive responses to fear, to increasing cognitive and emotional flexibility, to developing a fitness plan for the brain. If you stay with it and practice in a sustained way, Southwick and Charney promise, resilience factors will increase over time and build on one another, leading to a fuller and richer existence.