COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS
Because things could always be worse
AFTER SHERYL SANDBERG, chief operating officer of Facebook and incidentally, best selling author of “Lean In,” a book that helped women think about their careers, lost her husband of 11 years in 2015, she wasted no time in planning her second book, Option B.
Co-authored with Adam Grant, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the book puts emphasis on grief and resilience in challenges within life, selling over 3 million copies since its publication in April 2017. It even spawned a website with ever updated stories of resilience covering death, grief, abuse and sexual assault and illness, its front-page reminding visitors that, “Post-traumatic growth is more common than we might think. It’s possible to bounce back‒and forward.”
2021 has been particularly hard. I’ve even suffered downtime for exhaustion but the truth is, I comforted myself with the knowledge of gainful employment and food on the table for a young family. In Singapore, there are food stalls at kopitiams (coffee shops) with “Belanja” posters. Project Belanja! was a now defunct app-driven hot food redemption programme, in partnership with hawkers to provides the needy with freshly-cooked meals. When the programme ended, some hawkers took it upon themselves to print out the posters and attaching them to stall windows where customers where encouraged to “pay it forward” by pre-paying for a meal for someone who needed it. It was heart warming, calling into stark clarity that society only moves as fast as its slowest, most hapless person.
Years ago, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of true human civilisation. The student expected a discussion about clay pots, or even the first tools for hunting, but no. What Mead said surprised everyone. The first evidence of civilisation was a 15,000 years old fractured femur found in an archaeological site.
Without modern medicine, a femur, the longest bone in the body takes six weeks to heal. In the animal kingdom, a broken leg means certain death from inability to escape predators or even move to a food or water source. You’re easy prey. A broken femur that has healed implies this particular human was cared for and had time to heal rather than being abandoned. It was civilised: people had cared enough to wait for their weakest member. In grief, Sandberg thought about how others were dealing with their pain. “Resilience leads to better health, greater happiness and more success. The good news is that resilience isn’t a fixed personality trait; we’re not born with a set amount of it,” says Sandberg.
The key take away is this: you might have a finite amount of resilience but just as every bodybuilder has had a spotter help them out at the gym, we too have a responsibility to keep a look out for our neighbour.
Things could always be worse, but if you keep a look out, you’d find that it usually isn’t much worse because of the kindness of the angels we find in our lives. Let’s grow resilient together.