Resilience is about the joy of living

The Mayo Clinic, on their website, indicates resilience is about developing coping skills to handle the hardships that come along in life.

But I don't think of resilience that way. When I hear the word resilience, I think about all I've learned while adapting to my disability- and watching others do the same.

I see images of blind skiers heading down mountain trails, laughing and joking as they speed past me at Ski for Light.

I smile as I remember my friend Janet and I loading four wheelchairs (two everyday, two tennis chairs) into a rental car for a tournament out in California, a car that turned out to be much smaller than promised. And then being stopped during an inspection check on a highway by a California state trooper who peered into the car and asked us where we were going and what we were doing. When we replied "To a wheelchair tennis tournament" he replied "Well you either went to a lot of trouble to make that up - or you're telling the truth!" followed by "How did you get all that stuff in there?"

I think of the fourth hour of a doubles wheelchair tennis match in the blistering summer heat of Flushing NY several years ago as my partner and I doused ourselves with water and hung in there to win, my duct tape literally hanging off my arm and racket toward the end.

I remember dancing with Kent, who was blind and insisted on spinning me in my wheelchair - right into the DJ! I never laughed so hard in my life and the DJ, who had apparently done these dances for years, nonchalantly picked up his turntable as we headed toward him and backed up to minimize the impact.

I just think we give resilience short shrift if we define it simply as developing coping skills. ( And I certainly don't go around seeing disability as a "life's hardship", so that's a barrier for me with this definition as well.) In any case, resilience is about so much more than just coping skills. Sure there are frustrations, but when I look back on my memories, those times fade into the background. I know they're there and I acknowledge them, but I don't dwell on them. Because that's not what resilience is about.

It's about the joy of living. The spontaneous being in the moment realization that this is "it" - my life - who I am - deserving of not only respect as I am but open to celebration and self actualization. It goes way beyond coping. Resilience is an inner core of being, like steel being made on one hand, but it is open, fluid and porous at the same time. I can feel it, almost touch it. I know it's there. It's a part of who I am and it's a gift I've received as a result of living with a disability.