At his eightieth birthday party,

or so the story goes, someone asked legendary poet Robert Frost what he had learned about life. He responded, “In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.”

The four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry hardly led a life untouched by pain. His father died when he was a child, leaving the family destitute. His wife and four of his six children preceded him in death. Yet when he looked back on it all, what came to mind was a message of hope.

This story resonates as much with me now as it did when I first heard it as a teenager. Back then, every last second felt significant, weighted with breathless wonder and possibility. Writing my senior paper on Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, I left exclamation points and comments in the margins and copied out my favorite lines, underlining them twice: “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.”

I spent spring break of my senior year of high school visiting concentration camps and memorial sites in Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic with my Facing History and Ourselves class. The day we went to Majdanek, the sky was a washed-out gray, the rain falling in a fretful patter and smearing the windows on the bus. Once inside the camp, we could see the surrounding city from where we stood. As the brutal reality of the place set in, my vision blurred. My legs could not hold me. I sat down in the grass. All around me were the quiet sounds of crying. But then the rain stopped, and a rainbow emerged. All is not lost , the newly bright sky seemed to say. Keep going.

Persistence in the face of hardship is never easy, but we keep going. Melissa Oberkfell certainly has. Oberkfell has braved uncertainty and repeated reinvention throughout her nontraditional career. Despite rejections from hundreds of jobs, she persevered; she is now happily settled as a fintech lawyer at Early Warning Services. After suffering a career-ending injury, Dan Opperman switched tracks from professional baseball to law. Today, he is a successful in-house attorney at New Mexico Finance Authority—and a prostate cancer survivor.

These are but two of the in-house attorneys highlighted in our feature section, Marketplace. These legal leaders, who work in the high-octane realm of finance, are calm in a crisis. They have deftly maneuvered through legal gray areas, demonstrated agility and adaptability in adversity, and faced the unknown with clear-eyed composure.

As these stories show, even when a thousand anxieties lurk on the path from Point A to Point B, Point B will arrive eventually. Even on the bleakest, most endless days, it is worth remembering that nothing lasts forever. Point B will come, the rainbow after the rain, and each moment we are on this path brings us closer to it.

Meanwhile, when the going is good, treasure it. Every last second. No matter what, life goes on—and we will go on with it.

Hana Yoo Managing Editor