For high country farmer Jack Cocks, adversity came in the form of a life-threatening brain injury in March 2013.
Then 36 years old, the father-of-two got a massive headache; he recalls the pain as being unimaginable. He did not know what the cause was but he knew the outcome could potentially kill him.
His wife Kate phoned 111 and he was flown from their home at Mt Nicholas Station, on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, to Dunedin Hospital in the middle of the night.
In the five hours after her emergency call, he suffered a seizure, pulmonary oedema and cardiac arrest, before slipping into a coma where he remained for the next two weeks.
A brain aneurysm was diagnosed as the cause, a congenital condition called an arterial venous malformation the ultimate cause of the aneurysm.
It is a condition that about one in 10,000 are born with, and in his case it led to a haemorrhage before turning 40.
Following an operation in the early hours of the morning, Mr Cocks’ wife and parents were told he would most likely be dead by the end of the day — if he did survive, he would probably spend the rest of his life in an institute.
Kate Cocks was told the chances of getting her husband back how he was previously were less than 1%.
His parents, now retired in Gore, were told the son they had raised was "gone as they knew him".
But Jack did survive — his first words when he came out of his coma were to his wife, telling her that she would have to feed the dogs.
Over the following six years, he underwent 15 major surgeries and spent eight months in hospital relearning to both walk and talk.
During his recovery, he was asked to give several talks to farmers about his resilience and he found the process both surprising and humbling for the positive feedback he received.
However, he struggled with several aspects of telling his story.
He felt the adversity he faced was no worse than what many people faced, and he questioned whether his ideas on resilience were applicable to all farmers — "or were they just the ideas of one farmer who’d faced a bit of adversity?"
"I think everybody faces adversity. I was talking about my experience, but everybody goes through tough times.
"I’m just one sheep farmer who has been a bit crook. Do I know what I’m talking about?" he said.
Keen to answer both those points, and to get a wider view of farmers’ experiences, he undertook a study entitled How Resilient Farmers Thrive in the Face of Adversity, as part of the 2021 Kellogg Rural Leadership programme.
The first part of his study was a literature review, which uncovered the resilience literature related to farming was largely concentrated on climatic and financial resilience.
While that might have been about having the resilience to handle climate change, or having a balance sheet to handle fluctuating commodity prices, there was nothing about how to be a resilient individual able "to handle whatever is thrown at you".
Mr Cocks interviewed five farming individuals and couples about the adversity they had faced and how they had become resilient.
He did not know them prior to his research. Some had shared their stories publicly and others had not.
Mr Cocks believed the choice of case study participants provided a cross-section of the five main sources of adversity that farmers in New Zealand faced — health; natural disasters, climate and weather; financial; family; and personal loss.
He said it would be impossible and unfair to compare each of their stories; the level of adversity and situations they had faced were very different.
But all were "truly inspiring" and remarkable New Zealanders and it was a privilege to meet them and gain an insight into their stories.
Analysing the interviews revealed the common resilience strategies the five participants knowingly — or unknowingly — put in place in their lives.
Those strategies were captured in what Mr Cocks describes as the resilience triangle, which is made up of purpose, connection and wellbeing.
Purpose provided "the why" — the reason for doing what they were doing.
Connection, or "the who", was about keeping connected with other people — family, friends, farming networks and local communities.
Wellbeing was "the what" — the foundation for resilience; what they needed to do in their life to be well, or happy and content.
All of the study participants had thrived in the face of adversity, and how they responded to it had been a "textbook response".
When it comes to his own story, Mr Cocks knows he is lucky.
It might be him discussing resilience, but it was his wife who was the resilient one, he said.
It was her who put up with all the disruption to their lives. At the time of the aneurysm, the couple’s two children were aged one and three.
Luck, he believed, played a big part in his survival, while it was attitude that helped when it came to recovery.
Asked how he coped with his recovery, Mr Cocks said "you’ve just got hope you’ll get better. You just work away at things day by day ... celebrate those little wins as you get them."
Along with getting the best possible advice from health professionals, it was otherwise — in true southern farmer fashion — "just get on with it".
Keeping positive was very important; one of the doctors he saw during his rehabilitation told him that whether someone was "glass half full" was often the most important factor regarding their final health outcome, perhaps even more than the initial illness itself.
Mr Cocks did not ever doubt that he would get back farming. Farming and the rural sector had been a long-standing passion.
He grew up in a farming family, firstly in Mid Canterbury, before he finished his schooling in Southland after his family shifted to the Clinton Gorge to farm.
He completed a commerce degree in agriculture at Lincoln University and then spent five years overseas, the last two studying for a master’s degree in economics at the University of Illinois in the United States.
Returning to New Zealand, he joined agricultural consultancy firm AbacusBio in Dunedin. He married Kate in 2007 and the couple moved to Mt Nicholas, her family’s property, in 2009.
These days, his balance was not good enough to ride a horse and he had a few "minor deficiencies", but he was very lucky to be as good as he was, Mr Cocks said.
While Covid-19 had slowed things down, he had done some more talks around resilience and he had held discussions with Rural Support Trusts, Farmstrong and the Agri-Women’s Development Trust about doing more with them on the topic.
He recently spoke to members of a North Island catchment group and he was speaking to students at Lincoln University, in conjunction with Farmstrong, in several weeks. He enjoyed doing the talks, as "by giving back, you get a lot in return".
As far as his own outlook on life, he was probably less worried about things that might have worried him before, he said.
"A near-death experience probably does that to anyone. If you have life flash before your eyes ... I thought, ‘geez, this could be it’.
"It gives you a better appreciation of what’s of importance in life. Not that I’d recommend that for anyone."
