Born in difficulty

Mencius wrote: when heaven is about to give a great responsibility to a person, it first sets their will against hardship, exhausts their sinews and bones, starves their body, leaves them in poverty, confuses their undertakings. By these it stirs their heart, toughens their nature, and supplies what they could not do alone.

People quote that at graduations, and rarely read the end of it.

The passage is followed by a warning. When a state has no wise men inside and no enemies outside, it will perish. That's not a soft sentiment. He's saying the absence of difficulty isn't a reward.

The reason this matters for a person is that the sentence is not a promise that hardship will produce growth. It's an observation about what hardship can produce, in someone who keeps their honesty through it. Plenty of people are made smaller by the same events.

So it can't be read as a justification for suffering, and it certainly shouldn't be handed to someone in the middle of a bad year as encouragement. That's one of the cruellest things you can do with a good text.

What it can do is give you a lens on your own record. The things you're proudest of are almost always downstream of a period you wouldn't repeat.

You don't have to be grateful for the difficult year. You're allowed to notice what it built, later, when it's safe.

MOJOWAY holds both the year and the afterwards in one file, which makes that kind of noticing possible without pretending.