In preparation for the New Year, let's take a moment to reflect on how we choose to face adversity:

 

"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that created the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make a life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or deescalated, and a person humanized or dehumanized. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."

 

- Goeth

 

For another outlook, please read the poem "Invictus" by William Earnest Henley, recently popularized in 2009’s Hollywood movie by the same name and is said to have helped Nelson Mandela get through his 27 year incarceration in South Africa:

 

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

 

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud,

Under the bludgeoning of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

 

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

 

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.