Hardship knits itself into so many stories of life that it’s difficult to think that someone, somewhere, isn’t suffering. Hopefully, this is momentary, at times, temporary; but often hardship becomes a permanent pall on life that we do our best to navigate and somehow survive. This has certainly been the case in the last few years of my life after I wrote the book that grew out of my master’s thesis. In my case, the struggle that I made a part of my trajectory was a result of my own ineptitude, near-fatalistic mistake, weakness, and self-aggrandizement, leading in many ways through the jungle of adversity and back to the lighted space I thought I had won when I finished graduate school.
Straight out of college, I entered the ‘real world’, a young graduate full of knowledge and hopes. What I stumbled into was intense rivalry and a difficult but exhilarating walk through sheer uncertainty. Rejection letters were the norm as I sent job applications to well-curated lists of employers, organizations, and universities. I was in the race to get a job with the rest of the entire class, following job ads and going through dozens of applications. But the real thing proved elusive.
The months turned into a year, and the burden of disappointment only started to grow heavier until I felt it sucking me into a state of hopelessness: I was a failure; what was the point of this? Life is too hard. This is all too much. I’m depressed. I needed a spiritual solution to my conceptual problem I find a lot of people when they talk about ‘success’ don’t actually tell you what they mean by the word. They throw it around a lot, but to mean what exactly? And where exactly is this success stationed?
But among the stars lying unseen in the night sky awaited that tiny glimmer of hope: if darkness is indeed going to be your home for a while, perhaps it isn’t a prison at all, perhaps there are lessons to be gleaned from the journey, perhaps this isn’t an unyielding two-dimensional mountain after all, but actually a ladder with steps that you might learn to climb and, if you do, perhaps life would start to feel a little brighter.
Out of the chaos of doubt came the idea that patience is a deeply comforting and simple way to see the world: to think that if something cannot be known for sure, it will come to pass when it comes to pass, and in the meantime, it will be helpful to take things as they come without trying to force them with the brutal effort that only clouds the mind and saps the will. I would learn to relax in the uncertainty, to allow the mysterious river of my life to develop its own rhythm and flow, and I would enjoy not being in control, which eliminates freedom.
It was losing that sense of control, the acknowledgment of what we can’t know, that made way for miracles to enter my life, when it felt like there was no hope left. The winds started changing and I met a whole series of complete strangers who altered the course of my adventure. They included falling in love, my greatest miracle, blooming from the dark that bound me to someone I would never have imagined before.
You have been the calm where the storms raged around me and inside me. I have rested in a safe place when all the winds were howling, and we walked through storms and trouble feeling we were together in faith that tomorrow is for us to look forward to. Hand in hand, watching a summer sunset, I saw where every trial came to us as preparation for a time of greater promise; it was all part of the elasticity of the human heart’s destiny.
Today, I am grateful for them and the lessons they taught me about courage and character, about the depths of human resilience and the enduring quality of the human spirit, about the flames of fortune that purify the heart and purge the mind of trivialities, about the forging of character in adverse times, and about hard times being hard only when we fear them. My hope is that I never forget these truths and that I won’t lose my faith in the power of struggle. It is in the valley of hard times that we find vision and faith.
To anyone who is stuck in the middle of the mess, I write: Take hope — dawn always comes after the dark. Be patient — patience is a guarantee.
know that even from the darkness, the same fire that refined you is the one that will kindle your road. Hard times pass, but the strengths we gain from them stay with us always