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.
Whenever I get stuck on something, I'm like, 'What would I do if I wasn't afraid? What would I write if I wasn't afraid? What would I say in this situation if I wasn't afraid?'
I never had that feeling that I had to carry the weight of somebody's ignorance around with me. And that was true for racists who wanted to use the 'n' word when talking about me or about my people, or the stupidity of people who really wanted to belittle other folks because they weren't pretty or they weren't rich or they weren't clever.
A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.
The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures.
I promised never to let the Rwandan Genocide die because I knew the Rwandans didn't have much power internationally and certainly didn't have the resources. I felt it was my duty having witnessed it, and having stayed to witness it, that I had to talk about it and keep it going.
I think nowadays it's so easy as an athlete to become a statistic whether or not you lose everything or having trouble or whatever it may be.
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