The ruling part of your mind, when it's in its natural state, handles all worldly events in a special way. It can easily shift and adapt to what's possible and within its power when its first plan doesn't work out. It never locks itself completely onto one goal. Whatever it's working toward now, it pursues with flexibility and backup plans. So when things go against its original intentions, it makes those obstacles into its new purpose. It's like a fire that spreads through things in its path. A small fire would be put out by obstacles, but a great fire quickly turns everything to fuel and consumes whatever gets in its way. Those very obstacles make it grow bigger and stronger.
That inward mistress part of man if it be in its own true natural temper, is towards all worldly chances and events ever so disposed and affected, that it will easily turn and apply itself to that which may be, and is within its own power to compass, when that cannot be which at first it intended. For it never doth absolutely addict and apply itself to any one object, but whatsoever it is that it doth now intend and prosecute, it doth prosecute it with exception and reservation; so that whatsoever it is that falls out contrary to its first intentions, even that afterwards it makes its proper object. Even as the fire when it prevails upon those things that are in his way; by which things indeed a little fire would have been quenched, but a great fire doth soon turn to its own nature, and so consume whatsoever comes in his way: yea by those very things it is made greater and greater.