Resilience

Having resilience is such an important trait that I don’t think people view as being that important. Having resilience means that you are able to take an extremely difficult situation, and you’re able to stay calm about it, and think of a way out of it, or a way to cope with it. People with resilience are strong, and independent, smart. Being resilient means being confident in ones decisions, not second guessing. One of the most important things about being resilient, is also being able to use those around you to help make the situation for everyone, a little bit better.

Louie was stuck on a raft for weeks with two other guys, of course they needed to converse, in order to make decisions and ask about what they should do or need to be doing in order to make it another day. They also needed to communicate in order to keep each other sane. They were in the middle of the ocean with nothing else except each other, communication was key. One of the guys on the raft, Mac, didn’t communicate much with Louie and Phil. I understand that he was probably in a very negative mindset, thinking that he was never going to make it home to his family again, and that his life was basically over. Then you had Louie and Phil, who would talk to each other about anything really, just to make sure the other one wasn’t going crazy yet.

Mac didn’t say much, but I think that it was because he was starting to go crazy, he was just quiet about it, he was scared and couldn’t do anything about it, but he also didn’t really try. In the story it says that Louie and Phil would talk, and they would pray and sing, but Mac would just sit there. Maybe he didn’t feel the need to talk to them, or maybe he wasn’t comfortable, but I think that being in the situation that they were in, using the resources around you is the best way to go.

If I had been put in that situation, or anything remotely close, I can’t exactly say how I’d react because that is such an extreme situation, but I do think that I would try my hardest to keep an open mind, which I think is where Mac really failed. He was very pessimistic from the beginning and that didn’t help the situation at all. Yes, their situation is probably one of the worst situations you could really think to put someone in, but in most things I do, I try to stay open-minded, and so far I’m doing pretty good.

Resilience is a trait that not all people have, like Mac, some people might have bits and pieces of it, and some people might have the whole thing, like Louie. It seems like resilience can be a really tough thing to use correctly in a situation as extreme as Louie’s, but if you have resilience, you won’t lose it. Louie used his resilience to the best of his abilities and he made it out alive, with Phil. Mac had very little resilience, and a chance to make it out, but he just couldn’t figure out how to be resilient.