Everyone goes through periods when life feels genuinely hard, illness, money worries, loss, setbacks at work, moments when the future feels uncertain. The easy response is often to give up trying. Queen Elizabeth II offered a different way of thinking about those moments in her Christmas broadcast on the 25th of December 2008. "When life seems hard, the courageous do not lie down and accept defeat," she said. "Instead, they are all the more determined to struggle for a better future." She was not pretending life is easy. She was simply describing what she believed made the difference between giving up and pushing on, a distinction she had plenty of occasion to think about across seven decades on the throne.
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