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  • Essay / Overcoming Obstacles and Getting Ahead - 955

    Adversity enhances one's positive traits by providing an ideal environment to establish integrity and develop a mature mindset. This conclusion is valid because people tend to learn from their mistakes, thus gaining a broader perspective on life. Often, calamity serves as a catalyst for revealing latent talents; literature provides the venue where plots tend to revolve around overcoming challenges and difficulties. Notably, in the World War II novel, Code Name Verity, follows a young girl named Julie, who is recruited into British special operations. Because she comes from a pampered lifestyle, she is ill-prepared for the adversity of military life; her mindset is still that of a naive child, as evidenced by her identifying that growing old is one of her fears. From this comment, she foreshadows her detention in Nazi France. While enduring imprisonment and torture in the camp, she recalls her time in England, ironically lamenting how ignorant her so-called fear was, because at the moment she may not have the opportunity to grow old. Faced with death, her life is put into perspective before her, and Julie finally understands where her priorities lie. It is important to note that it is unlikely that she would have experienced this paradigm shift without being placed in such a harsh reality. Likewise, minor characters such as Alexei Karenin from Anna Karenina usually embark on their own character arc through the stimulus of difficulties. Karenin is a government official with little personality, viewing everything as a duty, and it is this bland impartiality that drives his wife, Anna, to embark on his affair. After realizing this, he acts maliciously towards her and declines her request to ...... middle of paper ...... from the former leaders. Gandhi gained a new perspective and subsequently avoided repeating the past; this led him to attempt to embark on a new path, perceived as better for India. None of this would have been possible without the perspective gained from studying India's brutal past. Subsequently, his efforts and strategies were later emulated by other civil rights activists, which effectively impacted society at large. Obviously, the perspective gained from looking back on one's mistake would be impossible without adversity, which serves as the origin of remediation; society would not be able to progress without certain constraints. Adversity provides the fundamental stimulus for the development of integrity and a mature mindset, allowing the improvement of past mistakes and the broadening of perspective on life, which promotes the progression of society towards idealism..