Art Blog
The Upside Of Adversity
by
Richard Rogers
on
Nov 05, 2024
Everyone faces adversity in life, just at varying degrees and in different situations. It's possible take steps to deal with your particular hardships and turn negative issues into positive life paths.
Dedication, motivation, and belief in oneself are absolutely vital to improving daily life circumstances. There are actually different types of adversity and those are physical, mental, emotional, social, spiritual, and financial.
When adversity hits (and I mean serious adversity) everything changes in a single moment. Suddenly you stop forgetting about how your hair looks or what you are having for lunch. Suddenly you are forced into survival mode and the mental patterns that you have learned over the years. You become disrupted.
This could be the very thing that pulls you out of stagnation. It will make you ask yourself what your purpose really is. It will make you ask yourself whether you are really happy.
If the answer to both of these questions is not what you hoped for, that’s okay because you now have an opportunity to change it. You now have some space in your life as you deal with adversity to come up with another strategy for how you want to live going forward.
They say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. The hardships and misfortunes you've been through can give you confidence that you're capable of handling whatever comes your way, some may call this characteristic, resilience. You've been in tough times before. How did you overcome adversity that time? What got your through? Your past experiences can help you find your inner strength and resilience.
Adversity provides you with the opportunity to practice challenging yourself in a new way; to find patience, humility, and courage to practice self-discipline; to practice becoming more resourceful, and so much more. In fact, above all else, adversity provides you with an opportunity to grow, develop and learn from the experience in ways that you never planned or imagined.
Author Maya Angelou said during an interview, "We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. It may even be necessary to encounter the defeat, so that we can know who we are. So that we can see, oh, that happened, and I rose. I did get knocked down flat in front of the whole world, and I rose. I didn't run away -- I rose right where I'd been knocked down. And then that's how you get to know yourself."
