Hindsight often can give context and meaning to our struggles, perhaps no more than when we realize that our lowest times have helped someone else hold on. Some comfort, that.

And maybe, even when we don’t have the benefit of that hindsight, we can believe there is purpose and meaning in our difficulties even if we never do know it. Isn’t that the foundation of faith, that things will work together for good in a big picture way if not perhaps in the personal way? And isn’t that what can give us courage and strength to do our best, to hold on, and to persevere?

As Rainer Maria Rilke said:

Among lonely people there is not a single one who can be sure that in his suffering he might not yet console someone else and that the gestures of his most personal helplessness, like so many cues and signals, might not serve as signs guiding the way in the realm of the unfathomable.

The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke.

The world is a complicated, interconnected place, and we are all in it together.