So we succumb to the idea that difficulties, struggles, obstacles and hardships are a way of life and attached to it, there is undoubtedly, and unavoidable, feelings of sadness, frustrations and disappointments.
Our leaders hold out education as the great equalizer and crucible of opportunity -- but homeless children struggle with obstacles housed students do not.
Amadou's teammates have struggled with obstacles of their own.
Fierce struggles against obstacles that were partly self-imposed: this seemed to be the pattern of Serra's career.
In graduate school, I took Cynthia Griffin Wolff's famed Wharton seminar just before her psycho-biography A Feast of Words came out, and it cemented my understanding of Wharton, her world, her struggles, her obstacles, her triumphs.
It is not to say I don't love and appreciate all of my friends because I wholeheartedly do, but growing older brings new struggles and obstacles and some of those I currently face are probably more relatable to other black females.
Compared with Europe or North America, democracy in Latin America must struggle against big obstacles, including poverty, gaping income inequality and corruption.
Film-making is always a struggle, but the obstacles in the Arab world dwarf anything we in the west encounter.
"We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles," she writes, "both of our own making and imposed by the natural world.
That means it probably will not have to implement another round of austerity next year, so the economy will not be struggling against that obstacle.
"I know there are powerful interests arrayed on the other side of this struggle, and the obstacles sometimes seem overwhelming to Americans," he said.
