Overcoming Obstacles and Coming Out Ahead

Adversity enhances ones’ positive characteristics due to the provision of an ideal environment for establishing integrity and developing a mature mindset. This conclusion is valid because people tend to learn from their mistakes, thus gain a broader perspective on life.

Often, calamity serves as a catalyst for the unveiling of latent talents; literature provides the venue for such as plots tend to revolve around overcoming challenges and hardships. Notably, in the World War II novel, Code Name Verity, follows a young girl named Julie, who is recruited into British special operations. Because she comes from a pampered lifestyle, she is ill prepared for the adversity of military life; her mindset is still that of a naive child, exemplified when she identifies that growing old is one of her fears. From this comment, she foreshadows her detainment in Nazi France . While enduring imprisonment and torture in the camp, she reminisces about her time in England, ironically lamenting on how ignorant her so called fear was, for now she may not have the opportunity to grow old. At the face of death, her life is put into perspective before her, and Julie finally understands where her priorities lie. It is important to note that it is unlikely that she would’ve experienced this paradigm shift without being placed in such a harsh reality. Likewise, minor characters such as Anna Karenina’s Alexei Karenin, commonly embark upon their own character arc through the stimulant of difficulties. Karenin is a government official with little personality of his own, viewing everything as a duty, and it is this bland dispassion that drives his wife, Anna, to her affair. After becoming cognizant of it, he acts spitefully to her and declines her request for ...

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...es of past leaders Gandhi gained new perspective and subsequently avoided repeating the past; this lead him to attempt to embark upon a new path--one perceived as better for India. None of this would have been possible without the perspective gained through studying India’s brutal past. Subsequently his efforts and strategies were later emulated by other civil rights activists, effectively impacting the general society. Clearly, the perspective gained through looking back on one’s mistake would be impossible without adversity, which serves as the origin for remediation; society would not be able to progress without certain duress.

Adversity provides the fundamental stimulus for the development of integrity and a mature mindset, allowing the amelioration of former errancies and expansion of perspective on life, and this furthers society’s progress towards idealism.