Many years ago, I have the fortune to visit Key West with a great friend of mine who has a love for motorcycle experiences, we drove on the Harley from Miami to Key West on our latest adventure.
We decided to visit Ernest Hemingway’s House in Key West, Hemingway was an incredible man, truly a genius of his kind, who had an attitude toward living and life that was like no other, and very few have received a Nobel Prize.
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Additional works, including three novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.
On July 2nd 1961 Ernest Hemingway committed suicide at the age of sixty-one. There have been five suicides in the Hemingway family in more than four generations – Hemingway’s dad, Clarence; children Ursula, Leicester and Ernest; and granddaughter Margaux. The generation skipped barely escaped: Hemingway’s most youthful child, originally called Gregory, died in 2001 after coming out as a woman, Gloria, of reasons that put a ton of strain on the expression “natural.”
What really happened to Ernest Hemmingway…….it is still a remaining mystery, his genius, the constant rewriting, the constant searching for a better phrase, a better word. Hemingway was completely ruthless with himself, as you would expect with such a successful author.
Adversity of any magnitude should make us stronger and fill us with life’s wisdom, why someone from whom became so successful at 61 in 1961 should take his own life, is something that I cannot quite comprehend or understand.
However, art in any form is born from adversity, I wrote ‘Freedom after the Sharks’ from adversity and set up a business in the double dip of 2008 and 2009, many people have done the same and it is almost a universal theme in the lives of many of the world’s most eminent creative minds. For artists who have struggled with physical and mental illness, parental loss during childhood, social rejection, heartbreak, abandonment, abuse, and other forms of trauma, creativity often becomes an act of turning difficulty and challenge into opportunity.
Much of the music we listen to, the plays we see, the books we read, and the paintings we look at among other forms of performing art are attempts to find meaning in human suffering. Art seeks to make sense of everything from life’s potentially smallest moments of sadness to its most earth-shattering tragedies. You have heard the statement ‘there is a book in everyone’ we all experience and struggle with suffering. In our individual and collective quest to understand the darker sides of human life, works of art like Kahlo’s self-portraits, which show us the truth of another’s pain and loneliness, carry the power to move us deeply in emotion.
We are constantly told, throughout our lives, that what does not kill us makes us stronger. It is difficult to think of a phrase that is more deeply ingrained in our cultural imagination than that one, Bob Marley once staid ‘“You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.” .Platitude though it may be, the expression has become common parlance because it expresses a fundamental truth of human psychology: Experiences of extreme adversity show us our own strength. And in the wake of trying times, many people not only return to their baseline state of functioning, but learn to truly thrive.
Writer Andrew Solomon has spent his career telling stories of the hardships of others. In the following video, a moving, heartfelt and at times downright funny talk, Solomon gives a powerful call to action to forge meaning from our biggest struggles:
My final word on the subject is that determination, resilience, and persistence are the enabler for people to push past their adversities and prevail. Overcoming adversity is one of our main challenges in life. When we resolve to confront and overcome it, we become expert at dealing with it and consequently triumph over our day-to-day struggles.
As Eckhart Tolle once said:
“Whenever something negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it.”
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