“If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” said Frederick Douglass, a former slave turned prominent American abolitionist from the mid-1800s. What is life without struggle? No one escapes it. We just experience it differently and in varying degrees. Success? Failure? Try again?
Hopefully resilience eventually pays off, and we learn the lesson that transformation is born in struggle. The struggle builds character, which helps us to grow and change, and become better people.
My pastor was 22 when he was traveling from Colorado back to New England in his Nissan 310 Hatchback — with all the belongings he owned inside. His car blew the engine on the Cross Bronx Expressway. Decades later, he shares that he feels he can endure any harrowing experience if he could survive that.
Then there’s my friend Cheryl McGuinness who on September 11, 2001, kissed her husband goodbye as he headed off to work. She never saw him again. Her husband was the co-pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center. Cheryl’s world fell apart. Cheryl eventually learned how to hope again. She went through an unimaginable struggle and later wrote the book, “Beauty Beyond the Ashes: Choosing Hope after Crisis.”
We all go through struggles in our lives. The key is to endure, push through, hold onto hope and make progress.
Rose Umerlik, whose current solo exhibition, “Remember, the world is beautiful …” at 3 Walker Contemporary Gallery in Kittery, Maine, has lived this. She, like many of us, wasn’t a stranger to family dysfunction.
Umerlik’s childhood wasn’t idyllic. Love and affection did not come easy in her childhood home. As an adult, she understood she wanted healthy relationships in her life and sought them out. She explains it was a difficult journey, and it affected her art.