Citing the massacre in an Annapolis newsroom and personal tragedies, ’11 alumna Blair Thompson offered a meditation on the power of resiliency that was published in The Baltimore Sun on June 29.

Thompson wrote that the June 26 shooting that killed five journalists at the Capital Gazette in her hometown of Annapolis and other tragedies can fuel a perception that evil overshadows good.

Now a clinical teaching fellow in the Veterans Advocacy Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law, Thompson ticked off a list of horrors, from the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida to the murder of a friend’s mother to the cancer diagnosis that forced the amputation of her own mother’s leg.

“There has been a lot of evil, leaving many of us to wonder: Where is the good,” Thompson asked.

While declining to offer an answer, Thompson noted that amidst the chaos, goodness emerges in small but persistent ways: from boxes of pizza that NBC News sent grieving Capital journalists who had a newspaper to produce to the reassurance that her mother offered to a frazzled nurse in her hospital room.

“At first glance, these pieces of good seem small, but upon closer examination, we see the resiliency of the human spirit contained within all of them, which is something so big, so enormous that it cannot be adequately defined by the limits of language, but only captured in snapshots when it is in action,” Thompson said. “Bravery is getting out of bed in the morning after staring with open eyes into the darkness. It’s walking to the grocery store after walking the tightrope over the abyss. It’s choosing to keep going even though it’s beyond hard.”