Notes on Resiliency

(air whooshes) (computer mouse clicks) (gentle chiming music) Headspace Studios. (gentle thoughtful music) Greetings, it's Thursday. My name is Kessonga, and welcome to "Radio Headspace." I hope everyone is enjoying the mindful music segment I've been doing this week, where I choose lyrics from some of my favorite songs and talk about how they tie into the theme and lifestyle of mindfulness. At the end of the episode, I always reveal the exact song the lyrics came from. All right, so today's lyrics are as follows. "See, that's how that Chi-Town made me. "That's how my daddy raised me. "That glitterin' may not be gold. "Don't let nobody play me." So sometimes, I like to kind of just spew out what initially comes to mind with these lyrics. When I hear them, my entire childhood kind of pops into my head. For me, though, it wasn't Chicago, like in the song, but it was New York, the Bronx and Harlem, to be specific. It was a thorough roller coaster of volatility. (laughs) Lyrics from another song by Lauren Hill come to mind here. "Every ghetto, every city, "and every suburban place I've been, "make me recall my days in New Jerusalem." Basically saying that this volatility exists in every urban hood, from New York to Chicago to South Central LA, and the list just goes on and on. All right, but back to the original lyrics that I referenced. (chuckles) So the lyrics mention the child being taught by the father to recognize danger and not be taken advantage of. Again, I see myself here. My father was adamant and very purposeful in how he raised my siblings and I. He knew the environment that we lived in and prepared us to know how to move within it, taught us to be aware, and, quite honestly, taught us how to fight. It's inevitable, especially for young Black boys in those days, that you're going to get into a squabble or two, so my father wanted us to know how to defend ourselves. So I guess what I'm trying to surmise with all of this is the notion of resiliency. Resiliency is defined as the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. It's a toughness that one possesses. So naturally, you can see how my father instilled a sort of resiliency in me and in my siblings. And I remember having a conversation with him about his own resiliency, and he stated that he got it from his mother, my grandmother. My grandmother was Cuban with an eighth-grade education. She worked mostly as a housemaid to wealthy families. One story my father told me that I would never forget that thoroughly painted a picture of her resiliency was about how he would sometimes accompany my grandmother to work. The house she worked in was two miles away, and she would have to walk it. When it was time to go home, it was late, and my father, who was around five years old...