Healthy relationships: A year into a pandemic, now is the perfect time to focus on resilience

March is a time of resilience, I think. With small experiences of an anticipated spring, but continuing to steel ourselves for the reality that winter is not quite over, March is a good time to practice resilience. I suspect for many of us, this March — one year into the lockdown caused by a pandemic — drawing on our resilience and reflecting on what that means seems particularly important.

Some of us are fully vaccinated, but many are not. Death rates and new cases of COVID seem to be dropping, but we know that another surge is possible and there are variants of the disease that make moving forward uncertain. This March seems like a good time to reflect on resilience.

The Oxford Languages online site lists two definitions of resilience. The first is “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” The second definition is “the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.” While many of us would really like to “spring back into shape” to get back to normal or have things be as they were before COVID, perhaps the first definition is the more helpful one here. When we develop the “capacity to recover quickly from difficulties” what we realize is that recovery may not take us back to before the original difficulty occurred. In other words, this perspective on resilience may mean that we have learned things from the difficulties we have faced that have altered us in some way, perhaps even contributed to our “toughness.”

This is true for individuals, organizations and communities. If COVID has made us more intentional about connecting with those we care about, through cards or letters, via Zoom, or online learning with our kids, then the ways that we have nurtured those relationships during the time of the pandemic may stick with us and the relationships may be deeper and richer than they were before.

For Centre Safe, the pandemic has shown us that enhanced access to domestic and sexual violence services through a text/chat option is a critical addition to our traditional telephone hotline. And we have discovered that some of those who use our services actually prefer doing that remotely through video rather than coming to meet with a counselor in person. Communities have discovered that when we all pull in the same direction — wearing masks and social distancing — that we can impact the spread of COVID in our communities. And that when vaccines are available, we can work together to create clinics where over 2,000 people can be vaccinated in one day.

Elizabeth Edwards, a breast cancer survivor and former wife of Senator John Edwards, said, “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.” While no one would say that COVID-19 has been a good thing, the pain and destruction caused by a pandemic have been too profound for that, we can, I think, “try to put together something that’s good.” We can accept the new reality, draw on our toughness, learn from the challenges and ultimately, put together something good in our relationships, our organizations and in our community. That is what resilience looks like and March is an excellent time to practice it.