Advice on life from a tour guide

In 1997 I finally went on a trip that had been a dream for much of my adult life, a trip to Egypt.

However even a week before I went, there was doubt about the journey, Islamist terrorists blew up a tourist bus outside the Cairo museum and I had doubts about the wisdom of making the trip. In the end I went.

A trip down the Nile, time by the Red Sea and time in Cairo followed. Our tour saw the incredible sights of Luxor and the Nile. The Valley of the Kings and their tombs and of course the pyramids too.

We were lucky to have excellent guides on the tour who were both knowledgeable and spoke good English.

Looking at some of the incredible sites one was forced to contrast the achievements of the past with the poverty  of the present.

In a quiet moment and in a light-hearted way, I asked the guide what had happened to that great Egyptian civilization. With a thoughtful look on his face he replied "Sometimes you're up and sometimes you're down.". With one sentence he had compressed 5000 years of history into a pin-point clarity.

Isn't that true of all of us? Sometimes you're up and sometimes you're down. What really matters is whether and how you get back up again after you've been knocked down.