The Woman's Book of Resilience. Beth Miller

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hard could it possibly be?). As a result the yard did not look as she would have liked and she got minimal pleasure out of it.

      When she moved into a city she had a tiny little planter box outside her living room window and a few large plants on the deck. She loves working these two places and cares for them both as if they were her flesh and blood children. She feels on top of their care. This small area was more manageable for her and allowed her the proper rhythm to learn how to garden.

      

Christmas clubs work on the premise of breaking things down into manageable pieces. By putting away a certain amount of money each month you have a sizeable chunk of cash in December to shop for the holidays without bankrupting yourself in one month's overspending. In that vein, a group of my women friends put away $120 every month for two years. We used the money to vacation in a villa in Italy for two weeks. The trip was extra delicious because it was all paid for before we even left our homes.

      

The model of recovery for addictions is based on one day at a time and distinguishing what you can control and what you cannot. The idea of never drinking a glass of wine again can lead to defiance and rebellion—too big a picture. Managing one day at a time quiets the restless mind and allows for minor successes leading to more success.

      

If you are trying to manifest a dream, remember that it can take time and lots of small steps to realize larger visions. I believe in dreams. Nighttime dreams that come to us with bits and pieces of information about ourselves and how we are in the world and daytime dreams that can forecast what we would like for ourselves. In either case it takes time to assimilate and absorb the unconscious into our everyday conscious life. It was fifteen years ago that I had a dream of one day practicing psychotherapy in a Victorian building. That was before any schooling—any paper written, any exam taken—and long before the arduous journey of years of internships and licensing exams. In fact, the process took so long I forgot I had imagined myself in a Victorian. I forgot until the sunny day recently when I looked up at my building in San Francisco and consciously realized I had my dream office.

      

A talk show host was interviewing a vegetarian restaurateur, and he was curious how to help people convert from cooking with meat to cooking satisfying vegetarian dishes. “Cook one new recipe at a time—cook a new meal once a month,” was the response from the expert. The talk show host laughed and said he understood the concept because “nobody lives in Manhattan—it's too damn big. Everybody lives in a neighborhood. I'm from the east side.”

      

It is extremely difficult to get our heads around horrific events or evil acts like war, slavery, and holocausts. Often they are too big and abstract to get hold of with any depth of meaning. And yet when we hear an individual story or detail the whole picture can become vivid and accessible.

      

Gary Paulson writes about his experience of running the famous dog-pulled race in Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod:

      It is almost impossible to articulate the race as a whole. It can be broken down into sections, days, hours, horrors, joys, checkpoints, winds, nights, colds, waters, ices, deaths, tragedies, small and large courages. But as a whole, to say generally what the race is like, there are no exact words.

      No exact words for the race as a whole. As most of these examples show, there are many, many times we cannot grasp the whole, especially when it entails something difficult. To be resilient, to stay in the game, and hopefully to see it through to a satisfying end, we need to see the pieces of the problem. These examples highlight how different people, in different circumstances, found a semblance of control over a problem, which in turn gave them a flexibility of resilience. An important theme throughout the examples is the attitude of “I can do this—I will find a way through the difficulty. I want to do this and I want to do what I need to do.” In fact, I purposely use the words I will to begin each spoke of the resilience process. Thinking about and applying the spokes this way indicates this attitude of self-determination and will power, implying a sense of control and beginning with an attitude of intention.

       The sense of control discussed in this chapter is completely in the service of resilience.

      The grandfather's pleasure at not being indebted to the anonymous man on the fifty-fourth floor did not mean he was immediately wealthy or not suffering the consequences of a collective depression. People still died from AIDS, Patricia needed to show up at work for the next two years, and Marcy had to learn to support herself. Control in the service of resilience is to make the situation and/or emotions manageable so you can, as the Bop-Bag toy, right yourself as many times as necessary while riding out the hard time, or righting yourself after the blow. It is not intended to control any outcomes; in fact, resiliency is not about outcomes. By its nature, resilience is pliable—not rigid. The bamboo, the willow, and the reed bend during a storm, and therefore the winds and rains will not buffet them; they bend and survive the storm. Control in the service of resilience implies we can choose to find the appropriate times to bend and we, too, can survive the storm.

       exercise

       MAP YOUR MIND

      There is a process called mind mapping that helps break large and cumbersome issues into bite-sized pieces.

      Begin by writing a subject—a project, relationship, job, emotion, issue, or goal—in the middle of a large piece of paper. What is it you are working on, what is the current challenge in your life? For example, you have just suffered a loss. Begin by writing this loss in the center of the paper. Draw a circle around the words, and then draw a line out from the circle. On this line, write your first thought. Draw out another line from the circle for your second thought, and so on.

      Look at these thoughts. When you see these thoughts on paper, in front of you, you might think of more minute parts of the ideas. Draw additional lines out from the first ones, and write the details on these. Think of the middle circle (the problem or issue) as the tree, the lines leading out from it (your thoughts) are the branches, and the next lines (the details) are the twigs coming off the branches.

      You are getting more and more detail. Now imagine yourself above this problem or issue, looking down at it. You will see the entire issue at once and what relates to what. (You can even use different colors for the trunk, branches, and twigs.)

      You can do a complete second mind map devoted entirely to emotions and feelings if needed or desired.

      Put your mind map in a place you will see it each day, and add to it as it seems appropriate. Reflect on how to use the information on the map to help you through the difficult time. This can be a way to break many things down and see the concerns, tasks, or emotion in easier-to-handle bits.

       not that one, this one 4

       I WILL DISCOVER AND GET MY NEEDS MET

       These days, though, I'm letting my real taste, or lack of it,whatever, show through. These days I look at the sample thatthe painter who knows so much about color is saying lookswonderful and I think, “Well, no, not wonderful, not to me.”

      —ADAIR LARA

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