this glorious fabric

Winter brings in the cold, and we have to shiver;  summer brings back the heat and we have to swelter.  Bad weather tries the health and we have to be ill.   Somewhere or other we are going to have encounters with wild beasts, and with man, too - more dangerous than all those beasts.  Floods will rob us of one thing, fire of another.  These are conditions of our existence which we cannot change.  What we can do is adopt a noble spirit, such a spirit as befits a good man, so that we may bear up bravely under all that fortune sends us and bring our wills into tune with nature's;  reversals, after all, are the means by which nature regulates this visible realm of hers;  clear skies follow cloudy;  after the calm comes the storm; the winds take turns to blow; day succeeds night;  while part of the heavens is in the ascendant, another is sinking.  It is by means of opposites that eternity endures.
      This is the law to which our minds are needing to be reconciled.  This is the law they should be following and obeying.  They should assume that whatever happens was bound to happen and refrain from railing at nature.  One can do nothing better than endure what cannot be cured and attend uncomplainingly the God at whose instance all things come about.   It is a poor soldier that follows his commander grumbling.  So let us receive our orders readily and cheerfully, and not desert the ranks along the march - the march of this glorious fabric of creation in which everything we shall suffer is a strand.

-Seneca, as excerpted from Letter CVII, Letters from a Stoic