Never like now are we ready to use all our baggage of knowledge to get ahead, to calm ourselves and not to fall into despair in these times of discord, disagreement and disharmony.
This is why it is very interesting to know the basis of prevention in mental health, especially discerning experiences such as that of Víctor Frankl and many other beings that, like the flowers of the road, are mistreated and yet they reappear.
I want to share with you a very new term that shows us the enormous capacity of human beings to get out of adversity whatever it may be.
This is how the word Resilience will enter the common language to explain behaviors that we know without having searched for them and found scientific explanations, as human psychology defines it now.
In recent days a journalist interviewed me and questioned me about my concept of failure and triumph and how we teachers handle them at this time in Venezuelan education.
I immediately brought to my memory the word resilience, a term taken from physics that has been incorporated into the sciences that study human behavior and psychology, which is defined as the ability to overcome adversity and emerge stronger from it. This capacity is possessed by many children from the “least possessed” classes, “the excluded”, who have the right to discover their genius and are capable of getting ahead despite the misfortunes and uncertainties of their lives.
It is not about the ability to suffer, but to resist, to emerge, to be reborn. Resilience does not mean invulnerability, nor impermeability to stress, it is better related to the power to bounce and recover. This capacity that human beings have makes us capable not only of facing the adversities of life but even overcoming them and being transformed.
To all of these, I wonder what exactly are the qualities for which people without any hope, in dead-end cases related to terminal illnesses such as cancer, AIDS, death of loved ones, permanent unemployment, abrupt losses of any kind, stories of children of alcoholic or drug addicted parents, survive and march forward as a sign of that capacity (resilience), without circumstances making them hit bottom or drown them. The word Resilience has its origin in the word resilience that does not have an exact translation in our language, but which means the ability to bounce back (bouncing back) to stand up again like those dolls called stubborn, a very particular quality to resist.
