Cruise Ships and the Art of Resiliency

Seven or eight times a year I go to travelogues put on by a small company who organizes and escorts groups of senior citizens on trips---mostly aboard, mostly women, mostly widows. The speakers generally talk about a specific trip coming up and their enthusiasm is catching, but this past week the talk was about cruising in general---comparing the different types of ships and what they each offer, cruising terms, what to expect and what to pack. From the small Lindblad Expeditions ships that carry between 28 to 148 passengers to the Symphony of the Seas that carries 6,680 passengers and 2,200 crew members, the more I learned about the larger vessels the more I knew I’d hate that kind of travel. Eighteen decks, twenty-four pools and twenty-two restaurants…gosh, I’d spend all my time being lost on the Symphony of the Seas! That would be my worst nightmare, not a vacation. On the other hand the Lindblad ships that cater mostly to people wanting to do underwater exploration, kayaking and scientific research would not be a good fit either. I’m always old-lady cold. In a wetsuit I’d probably freeze to death and they’d throw my body on a block ice until they got back to the western hemisphere. The expedition must go on.

River cruising. Now I could do that. The ships are small, most hold under 200 passengers. I could see the shoreline and swim to solid ground if I got tired of looking at castles, terraced farm land and towns built on the side of cliffs. Who am I kidding? Putting the dog in a kennel and the cost of cruising are the main reasons I don’t sign up. If I took a cruise or two every year like some of my widowed acquaintances do, in no time at all I’d be living out of a shopping cart with a dog who’d beg to go back to the kennel where they at least have heat and air conditioning. Yup, summer might be coming but my fun-in-sun travel adventures are confined to the places I can get to and back again in my head. Had I nice time. Wish I’d really been there. I do, however, seriously think about signing up for a half day kayak trip on the river I drive by every time I leave the house. I want to do it but I don’t because---well, I pee every two hours like clockwork and the last time I checked kayaks don’t have facilities for that. Like Roseannadana and my mom before her used to say, “It's always something — if it ain't one thing, it's another.”

The woman I was sitting next to at the travelogue was widowed a couple of months ago and she said she’d go a cruise tomorrow if she had someone to travel with. She says Sundays are the hardest because she misses the routine she and her husband had, so after church she sits in her bedroom all day and cries. I don’t remember ever crying the day away but raw grief like that? I’m so glad I’m past that benchmark on Widowhood Lane. I repeated a classic platitude people tend to say to widows, “It will get better with time.” And I suggested, “Maybe you and one of your prayer group friends could go out to lunch after Sunday service, make a conscious effort to establish a new routine?” 

The next day I went to a lecture titled, Looking up when Life is Pushing you Down. I signed up for it in the middle of the winter when going anywhere looked better than being snowed in. Here’s how it was described: “We all face similar challenges and tragedies in life. Have you wondered why some bounce back from tough times while for others, life continues to be a challenge. Are optimism and resiliency something we are born with or are they traits that can be developed?” My dad was an optimism extraordinaire and I've got a heavy dose of that trait in my personality but it’s balanced off by a heavy dose of my mom’s constant concerns for future security. Before going into the lecture I believed the bottom line message would be that in this particular nature vs. nurture debate nurture would come out on top, that we CAN develop resiliency. Duh, otherwise there would be no purpose for a lecture. No one would base an entire hour talk on, “You’re stuck with your self-destructive attitude, now go home and pout about it.”  

The speaker has been a Hospice Volunteer for twenty years and conducts workshops on self-reflection and personal growth and grieving. Resiliency, he says, is not about being happy all the time. It’s about having hope, about doing the work it takes to heal from our tough times. It’s about acknowledging the fact that in all relationships someone always leaves first. His bottom line is that to develop resiliency we have to change our self-defeating behaviors, our self-talk that often starts with “I can’t…” And he left us with a quote from Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. Lost in her widow’s grief she told someone she wished she could have her old life back again and that person said, “Honey, option A is not available so let’s kick the shit out of option B.”  ©