“I know a young person who needs this,” whispered the woman sitting next to me at a fundraising event for a social services agency. She was talking about a small polished rock, on which the word “Courage” was engraved. There was one at every place setting: a little reminder for each guest to take home. “You know, I do too,” I said. I slipped my rock into my purse, thinking of a young adult I know who is addicted to heroin. He doesn’t want to be. Who wants to live life enslaved to a drug? I’ve lost count of how many times he’s detoxed and rehabbed. Each relapse takes another chunk out of his store of hope. I pray daily that he won’t run out altogether. But this has been going on for a while now, and so where I find a shred of optimism is in a paradoxical thought: maybe, I tell myself, though he drew the bad card of addiction, he was also endowed with an inner core of resilience. There’s something in him that makes him strong enough to keep trying. Why is it that some humans are resilient and others are not? I’m reading Nicole Krauss’ poignant novel The History of Love right now and marveling at the resilience of the main character, an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor named Leo Gursky. Somehow, Leo transcended the temptation to give up, or to define himself through hate, even though his family had been wiped out by the irrational hatred of the Nazis. Leo grew up [...]