The battles after the wars are over can be the toughest; there's no longer the public interest that accompanies, for good and for ill, the start of combat.
Interpretation
Life's challenges often continue even after apparent victories, often unnoticed and without support.
Nancy Gibbs highlights that the aftermath of conflicts, whether personal or societal, can present the most difficult struggles. While wars capture public attention and evoke strong emotions during their course, the challenges faced in the aftermath often go unnoticed and unacknowledged, leaving individuals to battle their demons alone without the communal support that was present during the active conflict.
In practice
In a motivational speech about resilience and mental health, this quote can remind the audience that challenges persist beyond visible conflicts.
Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.
Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.
Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.
Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends.
All our efforts to guard and guide our children may just get in the way of the one thing they need most from us: to be deeply loved yet left alone so they can try a new skill, new slang, new style, new flip-flops. So they can trip a few times, make mistakes, cross them out, try again, with no one keeping score.
Honestly, I do not experience fear in the mountains. On the contraryI feel my shoulders straightening, squaring, like the birds as they straighten their wings. I enjoy the freedom and the altitude. It is only when I return to life below that I feel the world's weight on my shoulders.
The real point is that you cannot harbor malice toward others and then cry foul when someone displays intolerance against you. Prejudice tolerated is intolerance encouraged. Rise up in righteousness when you witness the words and deeds of hate, but only if you are willing to rise up against them all, including your own. Otherwise suffer the slings and arrows of disrespect silently.
I don't believe in taking foolish chances, but nothing can be accomplished if we don't take any chances at all.
You must be strong, dear brothers and sisters. You must be strong with the strength that comes from faith.
I play for high stakes and given an audience - there is no act too daring or too noble.
There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go - if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.
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