Adversity

I came across this message today from Aimee Mullens and found it to be an amazing perspective on adversity. The crux of her message is this,

"Implicit in this phrase, of “over-coming adversity”, is the idea that success or happiness is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscathed or unmarked by the experience. As if my successes in life have come about from an ability to side step or circumnavigate the presumed pitfalls of a life with prosthetics or what other people perceive as my disability. But in fact we are changed, we are marked, of course, by a challenge. Whether physically, emotionally, or both. I am going to suggest this is a good thing. Adversity isn’t an obstacle we need to get around in order to resume living our life, it is part of our life. I tend to think of it like my shadow. Sometimes I see a lot of it, sometimes there’s very little, but it is always with me. Certainly, I am not trying to diminish the impact, the weight of a person’s struggle. There is adversity and challenge in life. And it is all very real and relative to every single person. But the question isn’t whether or not you are going to meet adversity, but how you are going to meet it. So our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them to meet it well."

Feel free to check it out here:
http://cnn.com/video/?/video/living/2010/03/08/ted.aimee.mullins.ted