Resilient Tree

Filipinos are likened to a bamboo tree. A bambo tree is tall and thin but flexible enough that even if it bows to the wind blows, it remains standing. I grew up in the province, I could attest that bamboo trees are really resilient to withstand strong wind blows that other trees can’t.

Like bamboo tree, resiliency enable us to always rise despite the many blows of trials we have to endure. And we come out from the trials stronger, always triumphant in the end.

Resilience Defined

Resilience in psychology is the positive capacity of people to cope with stress and catastrophe. It is also used to indicate a characteristic of resistance to future negative events. In this sense “resilience” corresponds to cumulative “protective factors” and is used in opposition to cumulative “risk factors”. The phrase “risk and resilience”‘ in this area of study is quite common. Commonly used terms, which are essentially synonymous within psychology, are “resilience”, “psychological resilience”, “emotional resilience”, “hardiness”, and “resourcefulness”.

Resilience is defined as a dynamic process that individuals exhibit positive behavioral adaptation when they encounter significant adversity or trauma. Resilience is a two-dimensional construct concerning the exposure of adversity and the positive adjustment outcomes of that adversity. Adversity refers to any risks associated with negative life conditions that are statistically related to adjustment difficulties, such as poverty, children of schizophrenic mothers, or experiences of the 9/11 attacks. Positive adaptation, on the other hand, is considered in a demonstration of manifested behaviour on social competence or success at meeting any particular tasks at a specific life stage, such as the absence of psychiatric distress after the September 11th terrorism attacks on the United States.

Description of Resilience

Resilience can be described by viewing:   1. good outcomes regardless of high-risk status,   2. constant competence under stress, and   3. recovery from trauma.

Resilient people are expected to adapt successfully even though they experience risk factors that are against good development. Risk factors are related to poor or negative outcomes. For example, poverty, low socioeconomic status, and mothers with schizophrenia are coupled with lower academic achievement and more emotional or behavioral problems. Risk factors may be cumulative, carrying additive and exponential risks when they co-occur.When these risk factors happen, according to a study conducted on children,resilient children are capable of resulting in no behavioral problems and developing well. Additionally, they are more active and socially responsive. These positive outcomes are attributed to some protective factors, such as good parenting or positive school experiences.

Resilient spirit

Farmers, like many Filipinos and most of the people in Asian continent, understood the meaning of resilience. Farmers who face a brewing storm, reinforcing their humble hut with bamboo posts reflects a readiness to endure the wrath of nature, confident and secure of a better tomorrow.

In the midst of world economic crisis, there are countries, like Philippines and India, identified to be resilient  because of strong and flexible economic fundamentals. Well,  it maybe true as of this writing, but if people embrace the spirit of resiliency, we will see our individual country not totally devastated with the wind blows of recession.

We must embody the spirit of resiliency as we pursue our dreams by seizing every opportunities which in the end, propel us to financial freedom.

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The Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) is a bear native to the Arctic Ocean and its surrounding seas. Being the world’s largest carnivore found on land, together with the Kodiak Bear they constitute the largest members of the Bear family. The polar bear is often regarded as a marine mammal because it spends many months of the year at sea.  Polar Bears’ preferred habitat is the annual sea ice covering the waters over the continental shelf and the Arctic inter-island archipelagos. These areas, known as the “Arctic ring of life”, have high biological productivity in comparison to the deep waters of the high Arctic. The polar bear tends to frequent areas where sea ice meets water, such as polynyas and leads (temporary stretches of open water in Arctic ice), to hunt the seals that make up most of its diet. Polar Bears are therefore found primarily along the perimeter of the polar ice pack. For thousands of years, Polar Bear has been a key figure in the material, spiritual, and cultural life of Arctic indigenous peoples, and the hunting of polar bears remains important in their cultures. The debate over the bears had become one of the most heated environmental issues of recent years. Advocacy groups had called for the bears to be protected, not from hunters or developers, but on the grounds that their habitat was threatened by global warming.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature now lists global warming as the most significant threat to the polar bear, primarily because the melting of its sea ice habitat reduces its ability to find sufficient food, forcing them to go on fast. Polar Bears use sea ice as a hunting platform, catching seals by sitting next to their breathing holes and waiting to pounce. Spring is usually a time of feasting and not fasting for polar bears, filling up before summer when the ice retreats. What’s more, the early melting may also be resulting in a lack of prey. Sea ice is important to seals because they build dens for their pups in the overlying snow.

Environmental advocates said, “The rapid warming of the Arctic and melting of the sea ice pose an overwhelming threat to the polar bear, already suffering starvation/fasting, drowning and population declines as its sea-ice habitat melts away.” Warmer temperatures and earlier melting of sea ice are causing polar bears to go hungry/fasting. The number of undernourished bears has tripled in a 20-year period.

Insufficient nourishment leads to lower reproductive rates in adult females and lower survival rates in cubs and juvenile bears, in addition to poorer body condition in bears of all ages.

Seth Cherry of the University of Alberta, Canada, and colleagues monitored the health of polar bears in the ice-covered Beaufort Sea region of the Arctic during April and May in 1985, 1986, 2005 and 2006.

They immobilized the bears using tranquillizer darts and measured the ratio of urea to creatinine in their blood. A low ratio means that nitrogenous waste material is being recycled within the body and indicates the animal is fasting – a state which usually only occurs temporarily in males during the spring breeding season. Cherry’s team believes that the increase in fasting bears is explained by warmer temperatures and earlier spring melts

Anecdotal evidence backs up the team’s conclusions, with many more sightings of polar bears swimming in open water and resorting to eating other food, such as fish.

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