Resilience and its Connection to Adapting

Adaptability can take on many forms and terms but still equate to the same meaning. As Jancy writes, “The Oxford English Dictionary defines resilience as ‘the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.’ It also describes it as “the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity (2017).” Resilience is the ability to bounce back from any situation you may encounter, no matter how difficult it may be to. Jancy later on includes quotes from other individuals, one of which was Elizabeth Edwards who stated, “Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.” Regardless of how much we may detest a situation and deny that it is occurring, no one can prevent what has already become a reality. All you can do is accept it at face value and try to use it to your advantage. What good will come from wasting time complaining and dwelling on what has already happened?

I agree with both Jancy and Edwards on why they believe resilience correlates with adaptability. They go hand in hand as adapting is the ability to conform to a situation and resilience is the ability to learn from a difficult situation and being able to use it to aid in your growth as an individual and as well as, using what you learned and applying it to situations in the future so that you can become more comfortable in handling them. I realized that the more someone continues to deny reality or try to prevent something from occurring, it will continue to happen until you become comfortable in dealing with it or just accept things for how they are and learn from it. Nothing good will come from dwelling on what has already happened, all you can do is worry about the future and plan ahead on how you will learn from a situation and how you can use that knowledge to your advantage so that it can only result in benefiting you in the long run.