There’s an old story about a king who asks his advisors to give him something true in all situations, good times and bad. They come back with four words engraved on a ring: This too shall pass.
He wears it in battle when he’s losing. He wears it when he wins. Both times it does its work.
What actually gets you through
Not optimism. Not toughness. Not telling yourself it’ll be fine when you don’t know that it will.
What gets you through is having something inside that doesn’t depend on the circumstances. A sense of who you are that isn’t built on whether things are going well. When everything is uncertain — job gone, relationship gone, health gone — the thing you fall back on is your own character.
If you’ve been honest, you know it. If you’ve kept your word, you know it. If you’ve shown up for people, they’ll show up for you. That’s not nothing when everything else is gone. That’s actually quite a lot.
The trap of good times
Good times are their own danger. They make you forget that the ring is still on your finger. They make you sloppy, careless, entitled. The man who handles bad times with grace usually built something in the good times — some practice of integrity, some habit of discipline — that didn’t feel necessary at the time.
What you can control
You cannot control whether hard times come. They will come. You can control what you’re made of when they do. And what you’re made of is built in the ordinary days, long before you need it.