All things in life are governed by the law of cycles.
There can be no rise without a fall, no fall without a rise.
There can be no prosperity without adversity that has been wisely transformed.
A glance at the history of civilisations reveals their humble and difficult beginnings. Think of the fall of Troy and what Virgil created out of that disaster: the wanderings and adversity of the people who became the future Roman Empire.
The Aeneid reminds us that great civilisations can be built on great failures. It also reminds us that adversity is not the end of a story but, where there is courage and vision, the beginning of a new one, a greater one than before.
Difficult times do one of two things to us: they either break us or they force us to go back to the primal ground of our being.
Adversity wakes us up. It reminds us not of who we think we are in our vanity, but who we really are in our simplicity.
Success makes us fly with unreal wings and more often than not, like Icarus, takes us too close to the sun.
But adversity reminds us that the earth is that on which we stand. We feel our feet on this earth. We learn to walk again with our feet on good solid ground.
There are few blessings more solid than being made to take the measure of ourselves.
Too often we go through life with vague dreams, wild goals or no goals at all.
When we are successful we believe in the rightness of our whims and thought. We believe the most inflated things about ourselves. We mythologise our abilities. We think of ourselves, secretly, as gods. This can only last so long either in the life of nations or individuals. And this is disastrous for true growth. It prepares a fall sooner or later.
Adversity tells us the truth of how things stand. It never deceives, never inflates, never lies.
Success can send us flying off in wrong directions for a long time. One need think only of the bloated complacency of the Persian Empire before its catastrophic encounter with the lean disciplined force of Alexander the Great.
The highest point of a great civilisation is not necessarily its golden age: that is merely the fructification. The highest point is actually in its earlier stages, after a people have worked their way out of a long adversity, having disciplined themselves, and faced their truths, and conceived worthwhile and magnificent goals, and moved steadily towards them with faith and a rapture of overcoming.
Alexander after the conquest of Darius; England in the Elizabethan age: this is where a people most becomes itself.
In the midst of adversity, face what needs to be faced.
‘Sometimes the way up is the way down,’ Heraclitus said.
For there to be a new prosperity we must first have a new adversity.
It is in difficult times that the great times ahead are dreamt and built, brick by brick, with maturity and the hope that comes from wise action.
Difficult times, in retrospect, are more romantic than good times, if they are overcome. Myths and fables are made of them.