Adversity: Friend or Foe?

What if your greatest success in life was birthed from your darkest moment, your scariest challenge, or our biggest fear?

Adversity is your greatest friend or your biggest enemy, it all depends on how you deal with it.

I don't know what adversity you may have gone through in your life, but we all have it in one form or another. For me; surviving cancer was my greatest adversity. As tough as it was, and as much as I wouldn't wish it on anybody, I am grateful for what I learned; as well as how it shaped me into who I am today.

And strangely enough am not alone in that. On many occasions I have heard other survivors say they were thankful for the experience. Adversity makes us face internal obstacles that we would never have overcome otherwise, it makes us face external obstacles that we wouldn't have had the strength to conquer without that experience. Obstacles and adversity simply become hurdles on the track of life, that once you clear each hurdle you are that much closer to becoming who you can and want to be.

Here is a true story of just such a situation:

Anna Mary Moses loved to do needlework. She had been enjoying it since before she was married. But as she began to get older, she started to lose some of the dexterity in her hands through arthritis. By the time she was eighty, she could no longer perform even the simplest stitches. Therefore she decided to try something different—painting. The brushes were easy enough to handle, even with her arthritis, so she took it up full time, mostly painting farm and country scenes.
One day a traveling art collector stopped for a bite to eat in her town and saw her pictures in a drugstore. He decided that he liked them, and in a very short time the name of Grandma Moses was known throughout the art world. Although Grandma Moses didn’t even start painting until she was eighty years old, she was able to create over fifteen hundred works of art in her lifetime. She had an international following, and prominence as a world-class painter.
All this because she was forced to quit her favorite pastime and take up a new one.

May adversity never be a roadblock, but simply a hurdle, that once cleared puts you that much closer to achieving your goals.

-Jon Bohm