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.
I'm not the kind of cat that's going to cut off an ear if I can't do something.
In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
I abide where there is a fight against wrong.
Tonight, savagery in the streets of Iraq. Ten Americans die in a single day, four of them civilians murdered, mutilated and dragged through the streets....What drives American civilians to risk death in Iraq? In this economy it may be, for some, the only job they can find.
The fixed determination to have acquired the warrior soul, to either conquer or perish with honor, is the secret of victory.
Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart's strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.
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