I was recently in an interview (part of the team of interviewers, not the interviewee) and I heard the best answer ever to a dif­fi­cult question. It was de­liv­ered without the can­di­date missing a beat.

I described the situation into which the can­di­date, if chosen, would be placed. It is an external pro­gram, there have been issues outside of our control that have created barriers and obstacles for predecessors in the position, and while there would be strong internal sup­port, the employee often would be work­ing on his or her own. I paused and then said, “So basically we would be dropping you into the ocean. How do you feel about that?”

The can­di­date didn’t even blink.

“I can swim.”

I carried that answer home with me and shared it with my husband, Warren. “Best answer I have ever heard,” I said. “I can swim. What a great response!”

And it is a great response. Dropped into the ocean? I can swim.

I’m carrying that response around in my head all the time now.

I am four months away from hitting the fifteenth anniversary of my diag­nosis for multiple myeloma. Fifteen years. Heck, I was hoping for five. As I have recently written, my myeloma is in a holding pattern, neither retreating nor ad­vanc­ing. So the good news is it is not ad­vanc­ing. My lab results con­tinue to be flat-line and reassuringly monotonous. The bad news is I haven't achieved a com­plete response to treat­ment, and I'm nowhere near to doing so. That, along with the passage of time and the burden of treat­ment (both past and present), takes a toll. On my energy, on my over­all health, on my work, on my activities, on traveling, on just about everything.

I can swim.

After the 4th of July con­cert, when I was helping (very lightly) strike the stage (I know, I know: I did not move chairs or stands!), a longtime colleague came up to me to talk about this and that, in­clud­ing my health. His wife had suc­cess­ful cancer treat­ment (I don’t know what type) five years ago. At five years out, she con­tinues to be cancer-free. He told me her oncologist said that if she passed the three-year mark, her chance of not having a recurrence was 80 per­cent. He then looked at me and said, “The great news is no cancer. But the treat­ment aged her by at least a decade. We’ll take that, but we now deal with her being 80 and having a body that is 90 and all the issues one has at 90.”

I had never thought of it that way, but I under­stood him im­medi­ately. I am 63 years old. My body and its responses? Easily ten years older, especially when I compare myself to my classmates and other friends in the 63 to 65 years old range. And that’s with eating (fairly) healthily, getting regular sleep and exercise (most of the time), and taking good care of myself.

I can swim.

The irony of my latching onto that phrase is that I can no longer swim. I had to give that up years ago when swimming became too dif­fi­cult physically for me. Oh, I splash around from time to time, but swimming laps? Not doable. But when I look at everything I still do, from work to com­munity involvement to my personal life, I know better.

I can swim.

In the juvenile court world, we talk a lot about resilience. Many of the youth (and not infrequently their families as well) have ex­peri­enced con­siderable trauma (physical, sexual, and emotional, to name a few) in their lives. The ones who do the best, in a court setting and in the world, are ones who somehow have taken that trauma and built on it, or climbed up out of it, with successes against the odds. This is a phenomenon being studied by behavior specialists around the world, and the word that keeps coming up is “resilience.”

To put it another way, those kids can swim.

So as I walk along this crazy path, the one not of my own choosing, the one winding ever higher up into the mountains, I think of those kids. I think of that can­di­date. They can swim.

And so can I.