Undismayed: Turning Difficulties into Assets
“But what she achieved in herself was more. In a world where life was always hard and often cruel, she met the requirements without even flinching, without ever thinking of running away to some remote place in pursuit of evasive happiness. Just to have remained steadfast in itself would have been much. But she persisted until she made a greater usefulness of the hard conditions. She persisted until she saw herself in relation to things, to all things, and, right where she stayed, came to know the deeps of a serenity from which she could look out on whatsoever and be undismayed.” – Rolo Walter Brown
-The Hills are Strong
I read this paragraph in Rolo Walter Brown’s book “The Hills are Strong.” As a memoir written by a man who grew up in the same area of Ohio where I am living now, it’s been a fun, uplifting book to read when I’m trying to wind down late at night. I read this passage several nights ago and it stuck with me because this is what I would like to become. Life has never been easy, but coming up to Zanesville, Ohio on my own for a full-time apprenticeship at The Company—and trying pay my way with a part-time job—has been a new kind of toughness. It’s not the first time I’ve been working from morning until late at night and making every cent count, but having to meet both the time requirements of teachers and bosses, along the needs of my own body is a new kind of balancing act.
I’m not thinking of running away, but I did come up here in pursuit of some evasive happiness; one where I could make a living entirely through writing and publishing without balancing several gigs and jobs on the side. Only six months into a 24-month apprenticeship, some days feel breezy like I’m where I am supposed to be and others feel like I jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. I am meeting the requirements of a hard period of my life, but I can’t say I’m looking into the future without flinching. I feel like I’m climbing into improvement and parts of my life get better, only to tumbling down in another area. I’m making forward progress, but sometimes it feels more like instead of stepping into the next day, I meet it tumbling head over heels.
But God’s word to me this year was “adapt.” I think the paragraph above gives a good thought about how to do that. Not only do we learn to face things when we want to pretend they’re not there, but we can develop the mentality of many of our ancestors and learn how to “make the hard conditions useful.” Once upon a time, I blogged about “streamlining and optimizing my life.” This feels like an echo of that time.
How can we, my friend, take the things that are the hardest in our lives and transform them? (Here I can give the usual challenge to let the difficult things in life grow you as a person.) But I want to do something more than that. Let’s be sneaky together. Let’s look at those things that you feel like are killing you, not as something that must be endured, but something that can be analyzed, turned inside out, and used to our advantage.
Challenging? Yes. But also intriguing. I want to make a list of all those things that keep my brain in a sleepless overdrive, and figure out how to turn them from a slave master into a servant. How about you? What is one thing that has been bothering you that you can transform into something to your advantage?
