Once any problem is solved, it has achieved its purpose; there is no need to dwell on it.
If a person proves that he can endure and overcome a trial, that phase of life is put behind him.
If he does not do so, he will in all likelihood be confronted with it again and again.
For the most part, a test experience has to be gone through on one's own; nobody stands by to direct you at a crucial intersection.
There is often no help forthcoming to deal with seemingly impossible dilemmas.
The trial is wholly within one's own life structure and it is full of choices:
What do I sincerely desire, what is forbidden, what is it that is inevitably the result of my own actions?
Indeed, there is something humiliating about it.
No message in gilt letters is made available to us telling us that it is only a trial experience and that, if we only wait a bit, then in a longer or shorter while, the solution will come and we will be amply rewarded by some splendid insight.
In the crude reality of the ordeal, one cannot know that the situation is a stone fallen far from the shattered wall and contains holy sparks seeking to return to their source.
That the greater the trial, the greater the enlightenment it can bring and so on.
It is simply very difficult to get any perspective at all, the varying distance of the lights making for distortion.
That which is far away seems small; that which is close seems huge.
Only when the shell is broken is perspective restored.
The test puts things in place.
A person finds himself.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From The Trials of Life, p.76, by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz