Pull yourself together

Sam Neill passed away this week. He was an actor from New Zealand, but us Aussies always liked to claim him as one of our own, especially after he played the lead role in one of the biggest films in history: Jurassic Park. I remember watching it as a boy, inspired by the idea that huge roles like his could be played by people from our part of the world.

When someone we know dies, even when we only know them through their art, there are so often moments of sadness and reflection. Loss pulls at a part of us that we can neglect in the maddening pace of life. We stop to remember the good, recognize that life is fleeting, and perhaps consider how we might want to live differently. In that way, I like to believe that the end of something can still offer direction.

After his passing, videos of Neill began resurfacing, and one in particular stood out. He was being interviewed by schoolchildren and one girl asked him about the best lesson he had learned from his parents. It was a simple question, but it grabbed him. He paused, visibly moved by the memories it brought back.

The story he told was about his mother’s response to a problem he’d had. He first explained that his mother and father had grown up in extremely harsh times - the Depression, WW1 and his mother had lost her father at a very young age. These experiences had forged a kind of toughness and grit within his parents.

Fast forward to one day when Neill was at university, he realized that important exams were approaching and he’d done almost no work to prepare. Instead, he’d been spending time chasing girls, acting in plays and having a great time. And so, when those exams started to approach, he had this building sense of anxiety. When he went home to visit his mother, he explained how he was feeling, but his mum’s response mirrored the stoic and gritty mindset she’d forged throughout her life. Instead of coddling him and telling him that everything would be ok, she simply told him that he would have to “pull himself together.”

You can watch the clip here.

Pull yourself together.

The story Neill told these kids is a simple one with an even simpler message, but I think it’s worth absorbing. Sometimes in life, we might feel like the world is collapsing around us, but we often have the power and inner strength inside us to get through it. It doesn’t help us to worry and fret about where we find ourselves. Instead, the way forward is to do whatever we can to keep moving forward. That is the essence of resilience and getting on with it.

Neill himself had an interesting life with plenty of examples of resilience. He was apparently quite a shy child with a significant stutter, spending plenty of his childhood hoping people wouldn’t speak to him for fear of having to answer. And yet, he went on to choose a career in which he made words and performance his life!

And then, when Neill was undergoing treatment for blood cancer, he had to stop acting to focus on his treatment. With whatever spare time and energy he had, he channeled it into writing his memoir: Did I Ever Tell You This? It was partly because he needed something meaningful to do, as he admitted later that the project gave him “a reason to live.”

Perhaps these ideas are proof that the definition of resilience doesn’t need to be overly complicated. Perhaps it’s as simple as pulling ourselves together to get on with it.

So how do we do it? Here are three ways forward for me.

1. Respond rather than react.

   Pulling ourselves together means calming the body enough to think clearly. When stress takes over, we have a tendency to react without much thinking. Instead, if we can slow our breathing, relax the shoulders, and even just take 60 seconds to chill, that deliberate regulation can create enough space between the feeling we’re experiencing and what we decide to do next.

2. Reduce life to the next useful action.

   Anxiety tends to show us the entire problem at once. This is so prevalent in today’s world when we seem to have 15 different things happening all at once and we can’t decide where to begin. Instead, the opportunity comes when we can break it down to the thing that is right in front of us. It means making choices, but that can also be fun. I sometimes like to imagine a fork in the road. I can’t take both right now, so I must simply choose which one makes the most immediate sense, even if that means I have to double back later. Resilience brings our attention back to the next thing we can actually do.

3. Find something bigger than the problem.
   Perhaps this one can help in our time of most need, when we suffer our own immense challenges. Instead of lamenting the pain or focusing on what we’ve lost, what can we find beyond that pain? Neill faced the biggest battles of all when it came to his health, and his book project was a mechanism to provide him some form of extended purpose. When life becomes consumed by something difficult, we need something that reminds us we are more than the problem we are facing.

Pulling ourselves together might sound like we just have to “suck it up and get on with it” and, in some circumstances, perhaps there is truth in that. But a better mindset is to remember that deep down we are strong humans and can often do more than we think. We just need to remove the fear for long enough to take an important step forward.

Until next time friends, stay resilient.

Carré at Resilient Minds

PS- When thinking about those we have lost, I like to remember that one of the best ways to honour a life well-lived is to let it change the way we live ours.