Rainbows, resilience and Coronavirus

Like many across the world, my family has been learning to cope with the impact of Covid-19 and social distancing.

‘We all we got’

Today, during our daily excursion for exercise I couldn’t help noticing all the windows brightened with colourful hand painted rainbows and messages of hope to “stay strong” and “stay positive.” As we turned the corner onto a normally bustling main road we were faced by another message of goodwill, this time a large hand painted poster that read ‘We All We Got’.

Resilience in a virtual world

These messages are powerful and remind us that we need to be resilient when faced with adversity. But what is resilience? In the West we often talk about resilience as a characteristic, or fixed trait that we’re born with, but resilience can be more accurately and usefully understood as an ongoing process involving repeated positive interactions with the world. To put it another way, our capacity to cope is dependent on caring relationships with others, from our families to our communities.

The challenge of the current situation is that whilst we need extended physical separation to slow the progress of the pandemic, we also need social interaction to strengthen our resilience to cope with it. I continue to marvel at the myriad ways we can remain connected in 2020 and wonder how well we would have fared had this pandemic struck 20 years ago, before Skype, FaceTime and all the other technologies that have revolutionised the way we now interact.

I’m getting used to virtual connections with family and friends (even though my four year old delights in hijacking my FaceTime filters and turning my face into a talking pizza!) One of the most important factors in being resilient and coping with adversity is having people who care and seeking support from others. The challenge for all of us now is to stay safe and connected so that we can face this challenge together.

---