Halcyon Imagines

Imagining setbacks and suffering making us stronger...

 

...as outlined by J.K. Rowling in a thought-provoking speech.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

"The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned."

New academic research comes to similar conclusions after examining different facets of whether suffering can be part of well-being.

Both examples seem to chime well with the growing interest in resilience - on the personal level, of course, but also increasingly, in terms of organisational resilience and (ever-mindful of Ozymandias, as we witness the pillars of climate and finance and other resources totter around us) societal resilience too.

Imagining what could be achieved through phronesis

 

Aristotle coined the term phronesis, meaning practical intelligence.  It's the kind of wisdom that emerges from the long training of mind, body, character and engagement with a tradition.  This chimes with Malcolm Gladwell's recent assertion that acquiring true expertise in a discipline requires an average of 10,000 hours of practice.

Imagining the number of Paralympic medals...

 

...won by a particular nation being an accurate proxy of the way it looks after its disabled.  Or is it merely that investment is concentrated in high-profile events like the Paralympics to the detriment of day-to-day care?  Or, less cynically, is it just that a particular crop of athletes all happen to come good at the same time?

Whatever the answer, (a) watching paralympians perform in Beijing and then (b) listening to many of them being interviewed afterwards has been truly awe-inspiring and humbling; not in the conventional, sometimes patronising ("gosh, haven't they done well, in spite of everything!") sense, but in realising that with regard to (a), just how motivated and exceptional these individuals are in so many ways while, with regard to (b), just how much we are all the same in so many other ways.

So how do we keep these heroines and heroes in the headlines?  Personally, I'd like to read more about Ellie and David and their teammates' journey ahead than about many of their "able-bodied' counterparts who actually fill our backpages and bulletins...