Hana practiced every day, just like Ojichan. And every day her brothers [complained] about the horrible noise.
[The day of the talent show arrived and Hana remembered Ojichan’s advice, “Do your best, dearest Hana.”]
…
“This is the sound of a mother crow calling her chicks,” she said. She placed the violin under her chin, held her bow in position and played three squawky notes.
“This is the sound of my neighbor’s cat at night.”
…
Finally, as the last sound effect trailed away, Hana tucked her bow and her violin under her arm. “And that,” she said to the audience is how I play the violin.”
Then she took a great big bow.
from Hana Hashimoto, Sixth Violin
written by Chieri Uegaki
illustrated by Qin Leng
Kids Can Press, 2014
Please note: In light of the results of last week’s election, I just signed up for BlueSky Social. After this post, I have decided to stop posting on Twitter (X). You can still find my old posts there, and I am continuing to post here on my website, www.ShariDellaPenna.com/blog, my FaceBook page, and now @sharidellapenna.bsky.social, too. I hope this is easy for you. Thanks, as always, for understanding.
I have resiliency bred into my DNA.
First, a little history. Catherine the Great established the Pale of Settlement on Russia’s eastern border in 1791 and forced the whole Jewish population to move there. Pogroms began some thirty years later. Organized by the Crown, mobs looted, burned, and murdered Jews living in small communities in the countryside. (Think Fiddler on the Roof)
When Nicholas I, Catherine’s grandson, came to power in 1827, he conscripted young Jewish boys, as young as twelve years old, to twenty-five years of mandatory military service. Not a typo. Twelve years old, twenty-five years of service.
Then, in 1881, when my gram was a baby, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. According to most accounts, the Russian government used his murder as an excuse to target the Jews even further.
In 1903, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a cruel and vicious document created by the Tsar’s secret police force, was published and widely distributed. It might have been the first bestselling “fake news,” and it led to the massacre and exile of hundreds of thousands of Jews.
In 1903, in Russia, against this violent, unstable, chaotic environment, my great-grandmother had the audacity to bear a child. Three years later, Gram brought my three-year-old grandmother to find a better life here in the USA.
My father’s parents also grew up in the Pale of Settlement. The planet was in the midst of World War I in April 1917 when the US declared war on Germany. My dad was born a mere 3 months later in Schenectady, NY.
Unbeknownst to anyone, a virulent flu would be unleashed less than a year later. The flu killed more people than even the “war to end all wars.”
Grandmothers on both branches of my family tree uprooted themselves to start over in a land of strange food, strange customs, and a strange new language.
They did not move away from fear, anxiety, and scarcity (although they did that, too). They moved toward a chance for safety, freedom, and hard work that would lead to financial security for their families.
My mom and I would have a discussion sometimes when I was growing up and when I was grown. Mom was a “bootstraps” kind of woman. “People just need to gather their bootstraps and pull themselves up,” she would tell me.
“What if they don’t have any?” I’d counter.
“Then they best go out and get some. Your grandparents never asked for a handout.”
Yikes. But, on some level, I understand. They were resilient.
To research resiliency, I listened to a TED talk given by Lucy Hone. (Look it up by typing in her name and her title: Three Secrets of Resilient People.)
She says her three strategies are not automatic and even though they are easy to learn, they are not always easy to implement.
1. Resilient people, she says understand that sh*t happens. They know that suffering is part of life, and terrible and tragic incidents happen. And they happen randomly. Resilient people don’t often ask “Why me?” That doesn’t matter. Entitled people, quite a large amount of people today, believe that good is the norm. Resilient people know the exact opposite is true.
2. Resilient people are really good at focusing their attention on what they can change and somehow accept what they can’t.
This is a vital and learnable skill of resilience. Resilient people don’t ignore the negatives, they have worked out a way of focusing on the good. Resilient people look for things to be grateful for. A recent scientific study showed that after six months, people who named three things they were grateful for each day showed a higher level of gratitude and happiness and a lower level of depression.
Science tells us we are better off when we make an intentional, deliberate, and ongoing effort to tune into what’s good in our lives.
3. Resilient people ask themselves, “Is what I’m doing helping or harming me?” They ask the question many times throughout their day. By asking, we bring an intention to our decisions and give ourselves control over our decision-making.
Resilience is not a fixed trait. In an article posted at InBrief: The Science of Resilience (find it on YouTube) we learn that our genes determine where our center of resiliency is. Optimism and pessimism are two ends of a continuum. Some of us have the propensity to be optimistic, some pessimistic.
We all fall somewhere between the extremes.
Our environment and our life experiences, combined with the ways we react to them, are highly individual and highly interactive.
My grandmothers taught me to move toward the future. Lucy Hone reminds me to be grateful and stay conscious of my thoughts and behavior.
She says, “It is possible to live and grieve at the same time.”
I say we have to.
I’m reading Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby (Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 2021). It is very readable, clear, and concise. My “history lesson” came from Ms. Tishby.
Be curious! (Take time to grieve. Then, take stock and act.)
[The day of the talent show arrived and Hana remembered Ojichan’s advice, “Do your best, dearest Hana.”]
…
“This is the sound of a mother crow calling her chicks,” she said. She placed the violin under her chin, held her bow in position and played three squawky notes.
“This is the sound of my neighbor’s cat at night.”
…
Finally, as the last sound effect trailed away, Hana tucked her bow and her violin under her arm. “And that,” she said to the audience is how I play the violin.”
Then she took a great big bow.
from Hana Hashimoto, Sixth Violin
written by Chieri Uegaki
illustrated by Qin Leng
Kids Can Press, 2014
Please note: In light of the results of last week’s election, I just signed up for BlueSky Social. After this post, I have decided to stop posting on Twitter (X). You can still find my old posts there, and I am continuing to post here on my website, www.ShariDellaPenna.com/blog, my FaceBook page, and now @sharidellapenna.bsky.social, too. I hope this is easy for you. Thanks, as always, for understanding.
I have resiliency bred into my DNA.
First, a little history. Catherine the Great established the Pale of Settlement on Russia’s eastern border in 1791 and forced the whole Jewish population to move there. Pogroms began some thirty years later. Organized by the Crown, mobs looted, burned, and murdered Jews living in small communities in the countryside. (Think Fiddler on the Roof)
When Nicholas I, Catherine’s grandson, came to power in 1827, he conscripted young Jewish boys, as young as twelve years old, to twenty-five years of mandatory military service. Not a typo. Twelve years old, twenty-five years of service.
Then, in 1881, when my gram was a baby, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. According to most accounts, the Russian government used his murder as an excuse to target the Jews even further.
In 1903, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a cruel and vicious document created by the Tsar’s secret police force, was published and widely distributed. It might have been the first bestselling “fake news,” and it led to the massacre and exile of hundreds of thousands of Jews.
In 1903, in Russia, against this violent, unstable, chaotic environment, my great-grandmother had the audacity to bear a child. Three years later, Gram brought my three-year-old grandmother to find a better life here in the USA.
My father’s parents also grew up in the Pale of Settlement. The planet was in the midst of World War I in April 1917 when the US declared war on Germany. My dad was born a mere 3 months later in Schenectady, NY.
Unbeknownst to anyone, a virulent flu would be unleashed less than a year later. The flu killed more people than even the “war to end all wars.”
Grandmothers on both branches of my family tree uprooted themselves to start over in a land of strange food, strange customs, and a strange new language.
They did not move away from fear, anxiety, and scarcity (although they did that, too). They moved toward a chance for safety, freedom, and hard work that would lead to financial security for their families.
My mom and I would have a discussion sometimes when I was growing up and when I was grown. Mom was a “bootstraps” kind of woman. “People just need to gather their bootstraps and pull themselves up,” she would tell me.
“What if they don’t have any?” I’d counter.
“Then they best go out and get some. Your grandparents never asked for a handout.”
Yikes. But, on some level, I understand. They were resilient.
To research resiliency, I listened to a TED talk given by Lucy Hone. (Look it up by typing in her name and her title: Three Secrets of Resilient People.)
She says her three strategies are not automatic and even though they are easy to learn, they are not always easy to implement.
1. Resilient people, she says understand that sh*t happens. They know that suffering is part of life, and terrible and tragic incidents happen. And they happen randomly. Resilient people don’t often ask “Why me?” That doesn’t matter. Entitled people, quite a large amount of people today, believe that good is the norm. Resilient people know the exact opposite is true.
2. Resilient people are really good at focusing their attention on what they can change and somehow accept what they can’t.
This is a vital and learnable skill of resilience. Resilient people don’t ignore the negatives, they have worked out a way of focusing on the good. Resilient people look for things to be grateful for. A recent scientific study showed that after six months, people who named three things they were grateful for each day showed a higher level of gratitude and happiness and a lower level of depression.
Science tells us we are better off when we make an intentional, deliberate, and ongoing effort to tune into what’s good in our lives.
3. Resilient people ask themselves, “Is what I’m doing helping or harming me?” They ask the question many times throughout their day. By asking, we bring an intention to our decisions and give ourselves control over our decision-making.
Resilience is not a fixed trait. In an article posted at InBrief: The Science of Resilience (find it on YouTube) we learn that our genes determine where our center of resiliency is. Optimism and pessimism are two ends of a continuum. Some of us have the propensity to be optimistic, some pessimistic.
We all fall somewhere between the extremes.
Our environment and our life experiences, combined with the ways we react to them, are highly individual and highly interactive.
My grandmothers taught me to move toward the future. Lucy Hone reminds me to be grateful and stay conscious of my thoughts and behavior.
She says, “It is possible to live and grieve at the same time.”
I say we have to.
I’m reading Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby (Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 2021). It is very readable, clear, and concise. My “history lesson” came from Ms. Tishby.
Be curious! (Take time to grieve. Then, take stock and act.)
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