Robert Frost spent a lifetime writing about New England winters, stone walls, and the choices we make on quiet roads. His life was far from simple, loss, heartbreak, depression, yet this is what he distilled from it all.
Not 'it gets better.' Not 'it works out.' Just: it goes on.
He wasn't alone in finding something powerful in that idea. Abraham Lincoln once called the phrase "this too shall pass" the most fitting expression in any language. In triumph, it humbles you. In suffering, it gives you hope. Lincoln kept it close, especially during the darkest years of the war, because it reminded him that neither catastrophe nor victory is permanent. Life, with all its weight, simply continues.
There's profound honesty in that. Life doesn't promise redemption or happy endings. It promises continuation. After loss, life continues. After joy, life continues. After failure, wrong turns, grief, life continues. And with that continuation comes the chance to be different, to choose again, to build something new on the foundation of what came before.
It's the most minimal kind of optimism: not that everything will be okay, but that there will be a next moment. And then another. And in those moments, you get to decide who you become.
When everything feels finished, frozen, impossible, remember: it goes on. And that's enough.
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