A Chronically Painful Blog

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About Resilience and short-cuts

I have a few devices that bulge with short-cuts. That's okay for the digitally savvy. I think I'm still in Digital Preschool. I know my grandchildren think so. It seems everything must be done quicker than it was done 3 days ago otherwise we are not progressing. Really? My experience is that resilience is a slow growth process that is rarely if ever hurried. When I try to hurry the pace, the process becomes a short-cut and not much more.

For a while now I have been putting off a visit to the skin specialist. I have 2 little spots on my ear that don't want to heal. Maybe skin cancers, maybe not. So I took the short-cut of band-aids and ointment in the hope they would quickly heal. After many band-aids I concluded this short-cut  wasn't working. Yesterday the skin specialist found 17 skin cancers. 16 were frozen off and 1 requires surgery to remove it. As I left the doctor's rooms I realised once more that inappropriate short-cuts lead to a dead end. I can't hurry resilience. Perhaps that's because it's a continuous process through whole of life. Do I like visits to the skin specialist? Absolutely not. Am I relieved he found those 17 skin cancers? Absolutely yes. A wrong short-cut is a precursor to a world of hurt. Resilience helps me do the right thing even though there may well be some discomfort along the way. A resilient life takes a lifetime.