As I’ve continued to search for ways to deal with our multiple crises and how to prepare for the near and long-term future, resilience is what I’ve begun to focus on. Resilience is a term that refers to the ability to cope with stress, adversity, and change in a positive and adaptive way. Resilience is not a fixed trait that some people have and others don’t. Rather, it is a skill that can be learned and improved with practice and experience.
In Quinn Norton’s quote, hope can be thought of as resilience.
People often mistake hope for a feeling, but it’s not. It’s a mental discipline, an attentional practice that you can learn. Like any such discipline, it’s work that takes time, which you fail at, succeed, improve, fail at again, and build over years inside yourself.
Hope isn’t just looking at the positive things in this world, or expecting the best. That’s a fragile kind of cheerfulness, something that breaks under the weight of a normal human life. To practice hope is to face hard truths, harder truths than you can face without the practice of hope. You can’t navigate dark places without a light, and hope is that light for humanity’s dark places. Hope lets you study environmental destruction, war, genocide, exploitative relations between peoples. It lets you look into the darkest parts of human history, and even the callous entropy of a universe hell bent on heat death no matter what we do. When you are disciplined in hope, you can face these things because you have learned to put them in context, you have learned to swallow joy and grief together, and wait for peace.
IT IS BITTER TEA THAT INVOLVES YOU SO: A SERMON ON HOPE by Quinn Norton, April 30, 2018
Mutual Aid has been my focus for years, driven by my experiences in my Mutual Aid community. Resilience is a broader concept. Mutual Aid is one way, perhaps the best way, to promote resilience. That was why I’ve begun to study this guide: THE RESILIENCE WE WANT, A Guide to Making Your Community Space into a Hub for Local Resilience and Mutual Aid.
Yestersay’s blog post included the inspiring video from that guide, ‘THE RESPONSE. How Puerto Ricans Are Restoring Power to the People.’
The guide continues with this section on resilience before disaster.
RESILIENCE BEFORE DISASTER
How might we benefit from having more resilient communities before disasters happen?
As our friends in Puerto Rico showed us, resilience comes from the social cohesion that forms when communities organize in response to real needs. But in starting this guide, we found a blindspot: most of the dialogue on resilience talks about it in terms of disasters and what-if scenarios, instead of present situations.
“Disasters give us urgent problems to solve, and we’re comfortable with that,” said Willow Brugh, a former community response strategist with Geeks Without Bounds and FEMA’s Field Innovation Team. “But resilience is about realizing that there are more important problems we can choose to solve. Talking about disasters is boring, compared to resilience!”
‘THE RESPONSE. How Puerto Ricans Are Restoring Power to the People.’
One of the meaningful things about my Mutual Aid experiences is our focus on meeting survival needs in the present. Every week we distribute free food.
The guide goes on to say, “One problem we can choose to solve is displacement. Rising rents and hurricanes both cause displacement, only hurricanes move faster and leave more damage.
Disaster preparedness does little to prevent slower, less visible causes of displacement, especially for vulnerable and low-income neighbors. But creating a vision for resilience means building the neighborhood we want, before any disaster.”
Another of our Mutual Aid components is solidarity with those who are houseless in Des Moines. Providing food. And in the winter, propane heaters, or motel rooms when temperatures are extremely low. When the guide talks about displacement, that is about houselessness. And it points out that many more of us will be displaced, whether from rising rents or mortgage costs, or severe weather events. There now seems to be a trend of people moving because of hostile political cultures. A few friends and I have been exploring the idea of moving back to our Quaker communities.
It’s a New Year and with it comes a fresh opportunity to shape our world. So this is my wish, a wish for me as much as it is a wish for you: in the world to come, let us be brave – let us walk into the dark without fear, and step into the unknown with smiles on our faces, even if we’re faking them. And whatever happens to us, whatever we make, whatever we learn, let us take joy in it. We can find joy in the world if it’s joy we’re looking for, we can take joy in the act of creation. So that is my wish for you, and for me. Bravery and joy.
Neil Gaiman
“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something.”
Neil Gaiman
Following is more of my experimenting with artificial intelligence graphics creation.
Polycrisis Center 