In 41 AD, Seneca was exiled from Rome. He was at the height of his senatorial career but found himself facing trumped up charges from a petty emperor who was driving him into the wilderness. He was reeling from the loss of a young child, he was leaving behind a grieving mother. But what could he do?

Nothing. All he could do was try to survive and endure it, to not be broken by it.

In 1895, Oscar Wilde struggled under a similar fate. He had been ruined and persecuted. He had been humiliated and broken for a crime that was not a crime. But what could he do? As he wrote in his beautiful book De Profundis,

“The laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have suffered a wrong and unjust system. But somehow, I have got to make both of these things just and right to me….I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum until one’s fingertips grow dull with pain, the menial offices with which each day begins and finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow look grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame–each and all of these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience.”

Our circumstances can be unfair, unjust, unexpected. Yet? Yet? This doesn’t absolve us of needing to figure out how to navigate them, make good use of them. Seneca could not change the fact of his exile…but he could transform it. The same is true for us.

Whatever life hands us or a tyrant hands down for us, we have to make it right. We have to create justice and progress and good from it. It’s unfair, but it is fate. We can turn this misfortune into a better future. It is the only way forward.