Perseverance is saying no to life’s no’s.
It’s Chicken Soup for the Soul and 130 rejections from publishers until one said yes and Canfield sold 500 million copies. It’s Howard Schultz getting rejected from 200 banks to take out a loan to create Starbucks. It’s Edison and his 10,000 trial and errors in an attempt to build a light bulb. These are stereotypical success stories, a handful of people who made it and made it large. It's inspiring because it's rare. The motto is to never give up, and that adversity isn’t easy but it’s worth it. Work hard and continue. Blah, blah, blah.
Then there’s the perseverance inside the crawl of the small things. The pink salmon that swim upstream past grabby currents to lay their eggs in graveled beds. The thin beating wings of the monarch conjuring a four-inch span of strength to migrate 3,000 miles away. The push of the mountain goat, defying gravity up vertical cliffs of limestone and dolomite. The dandelions who invade the backyard despite being tweezed from the soil like unwanted ingrown hairs.
There's no thought of failure or success, just the animal body moving towards its vision. The command of evolution is an inner call to move forward.
When someone says they feel as if “they’re swimming upstream” it’s a metaphor for depression. The salmon do it because it’s what needs to be done. In the necessity lies an ounce of grace. If there's a ‘why’, there's a way. The desire forges a path, and the path forges a ‘how’.
The pace is in the patter of persistence, sometimes a trudge through the sticky mud and on other days a leap through the porous sky.
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