Everyone knows stories of epic struggles. Whether the story of Jason and the Argonauts, Giglamesh, the recently revived 300, stories from your own childhood. For some it may be from video game heroe’s, perhaps Doom or Quake, EverQuest, or WOW. Everyone knows at least one story of an epic struggle. For some it may be a family member who served in the military, and has shared something either they participated in, or an epic story from the branch of service they belonged to.

These are great stories and role models for us to use in our own life. It is always a good choice when life gets hard to think of an epic tale and apply it to our own life. At times though it is hard to make the connection between a mythic hero and ourselves. The jump is pretty great.

A mythic hero struggles against monsters, adversity presented by oceans, mountains, deserts, and dungeons. We on the other hand struggle against the more mundane and boring side of life, broken cars, sudden expenses, family emergencies, or lost jobs.

It is hard to bridge the gap between doing battle with a cyclops and wondering where the money is going to some from to by diapers for our baby. How can we compare an act of heroism against our own life when we have just lost our job? I have never read of a hero that was just told they no longer have a job.

I believe they are out there though. I know they exist. I will even go so far to mention that you know at least one hero who has overcome adversity, loss of a job, family emergencies, or other struggle. On who overcame and conquered whatever lay in their path.

Maybe you are the person I am thinking about? Have you ever considered yourself in a struggle of epic proportions? Maybe you are a student struggling for grades, a homemaker trying to make ends meet with very little, a parent struggling to connect with a teenager. Possibly you are suddenly single, prospects for the near future are bleak, and you wonder how you are going to survive.

While tales of epic struggles rise on mist from the past, or live in the imagination of a game developer, or take place on a battlefield far away and out of sight, there are huge struggles going on all around us that we do not even realize. Everyone knows someone who went through a tremendous struggle of some type and came out victorious. Yet when asked how things were in the midst of the battle of their life, more often than not the person involved in the struggle answers, ‘everything is fine, and you?’

There are the every day struggles that do not garner the spotlight that the rest of us go through as we go through the journey of our lives. We all struggle at some point in our lives against something we feel we are unlikely to defeat, yet somehow we do. We get through college, we find ways to provide for our families, we manage to overcome various afflictions that befall us in our lifetime.

Take a moment or two and reflect on you life and the silent struggles of epic proportions that you survived. Celebrate those victories because they are every bit as grand as any story ever told. Steel yourself in your stories of victory, knowing that you overcame a situation as bad or worse than anything you are now facing or may face in the future.

Reflect on the magic that is in you, the strength you found to not only survive your past or present struggles, learning to thrive because of them. When you have celebrated the hero in you, look at those around you, and know that they too fought their own struggles, scared and silent at the thought they may lose. Know they too fought on and they found victory, and it made them better and stronger. Celebrate the hero in each of us!