“Suppose that your person enjoys freedom and health, that you do not suffer from external injury. As to what happens to it in the future, we shall see later on.” – Seneca

Most of us, those of us with constant internet access, constant electricity, and likely a first world infrastructure that provides us with clean water and sanitation, we will never know what it is like to truly be impoverished.

Hardships will come for us. We will struggle with issues both great and trivial. Chances are however, that most of them will be more trivial than great when we reflect back on them in the future. This doesn’t make them enjoyable now, but it should allow us to have better control over how we react to and think about our hardships.

And having control over how we react to and how we think about the situations we find ourselves in is the only thing we need to do in order to turn those situations into something we can endure and maybe even something we can grow from.

We do ourselves no favors by allowing ourselves to worry about what sort of injuries or hardships life has for us in the future for a number of reasons. The most important is that we can not control what is coming for us, we can control our actions so that we do not heap up troubles unnecessarily. We can control our words so that we aren’t self sabotaging our own relationships and maybe even helping to foster and enrich the ones we have as well as developing new positive relationships. We can control our thoughts so that our mind is trained to see the benefits of situations and to know that while life may try to break us, we have the strength and the ability to endure and grow stronger everyday.

virtus fortis vocat