After writing my own essay about adversity, reading the book Touch the Top of the World, and listening to the podcast about grit, I have gained a fuller understanding of what adversity is and how it is shown in life. To start off I had never really put too much thought into adversity. I knew Webster’s definition of adversity and that’s quite simple: “a difficult situation or condition; misfortune or tragedy.” While doing these different lessons in class, the distinctions of difficult situations became much clearer. In my own essay it was me being thrown out of my comfort zone, having to adjust to a new environment that I wasn’t always used to and in Touch the Top of the World it was very similar, Erik became blind and had to make that big life change. He was forced to adjust to his new surroundings. We can’t really prevent adversities from happening in our lives, so the next best thing is learning to live with them and pushing ourselves to overcome them. If we choose to work hard through these adversities then we may gain the true meaning of why they are happening. If we just sit and let the struggles of this world consume us, then we just stay where we are, we aren’t learning anything and we’re not growing to reach our full potential.

Everyone is faced with adversities, so when they happen you should know that there are other people that you can go and talk to that have either gone through that specific adversity or who know how to deal with situations that are similar. This is part of the reason why you have to work so hard to overcome adversities. All sorts of other people are watching how you deal with what life throws at you and whether they see you give up or persevere through, they may choose to follow in your footsteps. It doesn’t matter how big or small the problem that you’re facing is, you need to always be working hard to put forth your best effort to overcoming it. There is a reason that God is throwing these challenges at you, He knows what his plan is, we don’t. We just have to trust at all times that it’s for the best.

One thing we briefly talked about in class that goes along with adversities is the concept of grit. We listened to a podcast that gave an extensive explanation of grit, Webster’s definition of grit is, “mental toughness and courage.” Throughout class we spent a lot of time talking about how grit relates to adversity in our small groups and many great points were made. However, one very clearly stood out to me and it was that if you have a lot of grit then you will be able to make it through a lot harder adversities. I very much agree with this statement because if you work really hard in different aspects of your life then you build up your mental toughness and that will help you push though adversities. So during the podcast, the speaker brought up the point that we, as a society, need to work harder to emphasize grit in the classrooms so that this upcoming generation can be strong in the activities they pursue.