On Challenges

On Challenges

What are your biggest challenges?

✍️ Author’s Note

This short reflection is part of Letters to the Prompt — brief responses to simple questions that linger longer than expected. Written at the threshold between night and morning, it reflects on challenges not as obstacles to overcome, but as invitations to attention and intention.

Letters to the Prompt

Before going to bed this morning—never a wise moment—I glanced at my iPhone. A bad habit, one of many. Yet one question lingered with me:

What are your biggest challenges?

It is, perhaps, the wrong question to ask an octogenarian.
If I am honest, my greatest challenge is simple:
to see the sun rise the next morning.

The poet once wrote:

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.
Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”

The poet was Rumi, who viewed challenges not as obstacles, but as transformations—urging acceptance of life’s flow, and the cultivation of inner strength as a path of growth.

When I look at the world around me—with its conflicts, climate change, nuclear weapons, and artificial intelligence—I may be troubled. Yet Rumi reminds us:

Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world.
All things break. And all things can be mended.
Not with time, as they say, but with intention.”

What I take from this is simple:
a challenge is never merely negative.
It is a call to attention.
And through it, we may yet find strength.

William J J Houtzager, Aka WJJH, January 2026

📌Blog Excerpt

If I am honest, my greatest challenge is simple: to see the sun rise the next morning.