Regardless of how one may feel in any given moment, real life can present no task before us for which we are “inadequate.”

Yes, we may be unprepared at its outset — just as a leaf-bare late autumn tree can’t know, in advance, the weight of a heavy winter snowfall until its branches bend and maybe even break beneath it. But no tree is its limbs, and neither are we made less for what we can’t do or carry when first challenged by something that seems too great for us to handle.

Our truest strength lies in our ability to realize that whatever our present weakness may be, it is only temporary, provided we are willing to persist, to wade into what seems greater than we are, and to test this truth time and time again.

The unimaginable reward of persisting through whatever stands in your way is the eventual — the inevitable — discovery of this fundamental truth: