| March
29, 2005:
Leading A Resilient Life
Interview
with Gordon McDonald, author of the book, A
Resilient Life |
Mike
Carruthers:
Do you think of yourself as a resilient person? Gordon
McDonald:
Well,
resilience is a word that describes people who have gotten healthier as life has
gone on in every sense of that word. Gordon
McDonald, author of the book,
A Resilient Life… They
generally are people who somewhere along the line have gone through various forms
of adversity, have not only survived it but thrived in the middle of it. And then
the most important thing is they become an inspiration for people around them. There
are real rewards for leading a purposeful resilient life. Well,
the benefit of being resilient first of all is that your life is marked with what
C.S. Lewis used to call joy. There's a sense of purposefulness for every decade
of life. One does not end up life bitter and angry or passive. Gordon
says there are some basic principles resilient people live by. The
first one was of course to have a strategic view of life. To be looking kind of
down stream in life asking where are the choices I'm making today leading me?
Secondly, looking backwards-the longer I live I have a past. A resilient person
is one who looks into that past and resolves it. Things in the past that were
done wrong are repented for, things that other people have done to me are forgiven.
And the third thing is to acquire a set of discipline that brings my present day
life under self-control. There are very few things that bring more joy to the
human soul than to know that various aspects of my life are under control and
are reaching out to things that they normally would not have touched if I hadn't
made the attempt. At
somethingyoushouldknow.net
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.
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