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  • Michael Edmondson

How often do you gather strength from distress?


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Today is November 2 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you gather strength from distress?”

You can listen to today's podcast here.

For those navigating the chaos encountering distress is simply part of the journey.

In fact, it would be difficult for you to find someone who navigated the chaos with ease.

As discussed elsewhere in the Navigate the Chaos blog, failures, hurdles, and obstacles are generally part of the normal course of navigating the chaos.

Many artists, writers, and actors who navigate the chaos have learned to gather strength from distress.

As Dr. Kathryn Gordon noted in her article "5 Ways to Deal with Distress" in Psychology Today "Distress is an inevitable part of life, but tolerating it at high intensities can be really challenging." Dr. Gordon summarizes five ways people can help navigate the distress.

One of those five specific tactics people have at their disposal is to remember that you can get through it. Gordon wrote:

Distress feels worse when you believe that: 1) you can't withstand it, and 2) it'll always be at its highest intensity. Looking at your past, are there examples of other hardships you've made it through? Are there other people who made it through what you're enduring? Answers to these questions can boost your confidence, so that you can tolerate the distress, even when you don't feel like it. Secondly, emotions usually fade in intensity with the passage of time. Even when emotions return in waves, there are varying levels of intensity in between them. Remember that you will have periods of relief from the toughest parts, even if it doesn't feel that way in the moment.

Soul singer Sharon Jones (1956-2016) did just that. For decades Jones found strength in the distress of trying to succeed as a singer. She had an unshakeable belief in herself as she spent decades working towards her break.

Record label officials often told her she was “too short, too fat, too black and too old.”

A regular gospel singer in church, during the early 1970s Jones often entered talent shows backed by local funk bands.

Session work then continued with backing vocals, often credited to Lafaye Jones, but in the absence of any recording contract as a solo singer, she spent many years working as a corrections officer at Rikers Island and as an armored car guard for Wells Fargo,

As The New York Times noted in its obituary of Ms. Jones, "To support herself, Ms. Jones worked as a prison guard at Rikers Island in the late 1980s and then as an armed security guard for Wells Fargo. At one recording session directly after work, she was still wearing her Wells Fargo uniform, complete with gun. It led to the title of one of her early singles, “Damn It’s Hot.”

Jones received a mid-life career break in 1996 at 40 years of age after she appeared on a session backing the soul and deep funk legend Lee Fields.

The session was organized by Gabriel Roth and Philippe Lehman, then the owner of the now-defunct French record label Pure Records.

Jones was the only one of three singers called to the session to show up. As Woody Allen said in an August 1977 interview with Susan Braudy for The New York Times, "I have learned one thing 'showing up is 80 percent of life.'"

Jones showed up and it changed her life.

Having completed all the backing parts herself, Roth and Lehman were suitably impressed with her performance and recorded "Switchblade", a solo track with Jones.

"Recording on vintage equipment with vintage instruments, Ms. Jones and the Dap-Kings were leaders of a New York City-centered soul revival."

Jones would eventually play a juke joint singer in “The Great Debaters,” a 2007 film by Denzel Washington.

When she and the Dap-Kings released their 2007 album, “100 Days, 100 Nights,” they performed at the Apollo Theater. Album by album and tour by tour, Ms. Jones’s audience and reputation grew. She toured with Lou Reed and sang with Phish and Michael Bublé.

In 2013, as she prepared to release the album “Give the People What They Want,” she was diagnosed with stage 2 pancreatic cancer. She and the Dap-Kings performed on a float in the 2013 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade anyway. The album was postponed for a year while Ms. Jones underwent surgery and chemotherapy — a period documented by the director Barbara Kopple in “Miss Sharon Jones!”

As one review stated: "If Miss Sharon Jones! could be boiled down to a single scene, it would go something like this: the 59-year-old soul singer – currently in the throes of chemotherapy for Stage Two pancreatic cancer – hobbles up a small set of church steps; huffing, puffing, and clutching the rail despite the short ascent. By the time she takes her seat in the pews, she’s exhausted. At some point, the musicians at the altar start playing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow”. Sharon Jones creaks her head up and walks to the front of the chapel, her breathing growing steadier with each step. 'I sing because I'm happy' she whispers."

It took Jones until 40 years of age to gather strength from the distress and navigate the chaos in order to achieve success as a musical artist. Later in life she learned how to navigate the perils of cancer and bounced back for one last round of performances before her death at 60 years of age in 2016.

Jones lived a remarkable life that personified gathering strength from distress. She used the distress as fuel to keep her moving forward.

In his 1776 publication The Crisis, Thomas Paine wrote “The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.”

How often do you gather strength from distress?

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