Stellar Theology: "Ad Astra Per Aspera"

This Latin phrase means “to the stars through hardships.” It is the state motto of Kansas, among many sundry organizations, and can be found in many book, movie, and music titles. Unlike my previous posts in this series on the stars, this saying is intended more metaphorically than literally. The idea is more of the necessity of persisting through difficulties in order to achieve greatness. Anything worth doing will run through struggle, not around it.

While the earliest origins of this phrase stem from Ancient Rome and Stoicism philosophy, it certainly runs countercultural to modern life. The period since World War II has been a period of boom and of making life easier, more convenient, and more comfortable. There are mixes for just about any dinner or dessert, if you don’t just plain buy it pre-made. We have dishwashers, coffee makers, and see-through refrigerators, so we don’t even have to open the door anymore to see what’s inside. We have gadgets and gizmos galore designed to alleviate and prevent struggle and hardship. Some of these are incredibly helpful, such as the small insulin pump that means people with diabetes no longer have to prick their fingers every day in order to test their glucose levels. Medical advancements certainly make a positive difference.

However, when so much in life is convenient, it can become more of a struggle to deal with inconveniences. It can become easy to expect that everything should be easy. Social media influencers generally don’t post their early videos before they learned how to do a skill. They rarely show the struggle, whereas 80s movies excelled at the montage piece showing the main character working and practicing to achieve their goal. “The Karate Kid” and the Rocky movies, among others, had extended training sequences. Now, these montage scenes of learning and mastering a new skill are largely missing, and we’re only shown the finished product, as if it were easy and took no work whatsoever.

The truth is that struggle and hardship and difficulties are part of life. They are unavoidable. They cannot be edited out. Just as much, we don’t always get to choose what the difficulty is or who will help us with it. Anything worth doing is not going to be easy and it’s going to come at a cost. You can’t wake up one morning and decide you’re going to the stars that day. It takes years of hard work to learn and study and prepare. Great heights are not achieved instantaneously. We can’t put them into a box mix. The only way to the stars is through struggle.