Building Resilience and What I Did on My Christmas Vacation

This past Christmas / New Years Tiffany and I traveled to New Zealand with some friends to see my mother and her husband and to do some traveling on the south island. The way that Air NZD runs their flights to and from, we basically had red eyes going in each direction. In an effort to be good citizens we declared our hiking shoes on the way into the country, only to be delayed in a long and inefficient customs line and missing our connection to Queenstown, then having to take an extra flight to Wellington to get there. When we completed the hour plus drive to Wanaka from Queenstown I was a bit tired, but overall not too much worse for wear.

Then on a warm, cloudless Christmas Day, just a couple of days after our arrival, we hiked Isthmus Peak near Wanaka. The hike took nearly 6 hours and involved climbing continuously up 4000 vertical feet on a completely exposed trail. I was physically tired from it, but again, felt pretty good the day after and going forward.

A day or so after that we splurged big and hired a plane to fly us from Wanaka to Milford Sound where we took a 2 hour cruise through the sound before hopping back on the plane and flying back to Wanaka. I am quite prone to motion sickness, and this was not a big stable commercial jet but a 6 seater prop plane that felt like flying in a yellow bucket with wings. The views were out of this world, but also dizzying. My friend seated behind me faired rather poorly, but I managed to walk away from the trip with relatively little impact.

After a 4 night stay in Wanaka we said goodbye to my mother and her husband David, and then Tiffany, our friends and I hit the road for another 10 days. In those days we spent countless hours in the car and never slept in the same strange bed for more than 2 nights. The balance of the trip included more hiking, quite a bit of sight seeing and a lot of restaurant food.

On the way home from Auckland after connecting from Nelson I watched 4 movies and semi-slept for a few hours before navigating customs and catching the airporter back to Marin. Oddly, when I got home from the near 24 hour return trip I felt almost as though I had never left and traveled 1/2 way around the globe and back again.

What I realized from this experience and the reason I’m telling you about it is that I had, without really focusing on it or explicitly trying to cultivate it, managed to build a fair bit of resilience. I can think of no other way I would have made such a big and involved trip with so little relative impact on my health and sense of wellbeing.

This got me thinking about resilience and how it manifests. Most of us can claim at least some degree of resilience in some areas of our lives. I might have good flexibility and enjoy the kind of resilience that affords by allowing me to occupy relatively small and cramped spaces for extended periods, like coach airplane seats for instance, and bounce back quickly from it. Or I might have good strength and can manage lugging heavy baggage through airports or charging up and down mountains in the hot sun without suffering an injury. Or I might have a digestive system that can handle all sorts of foods from all sorts of unfamiliar kitchens with very few digestive complaints. Or perhaps I have an immune system that can handle the stress of a lack of sound sleep and an excess of different environments and degrees of air quality without succumbing to bugs, respiratory or otherwise.

But it’s unusual, in my view, that each of us has all of the areas of our life that afford us resilience in optimal working order, and for most of us any deficiencies in resilience can be corrected with very doable changes in diet and lifestyle. This view has inspired me to write a series of posts on the subject. These posts will address several key areas where we can increase our resilience and they will offer suggestions on how to build and effective bulwark to the inevitable stresses that we all endure, voluntarily or otherwise.

I hope you’ll find these helpful.  As always, I welcome your feedback.