The image of a long distance runner. The swimmer who tries to swim across the English Channel. The hockey game that is now in its second 20 minute overtime.
How quickly we have been trained to associate endurance to sports and athletic endeavors. I never heard the word endurance growing up. Not at school. Not at home. We were taught as children to be honest, loving, hard working, responsible, and to believe in God.
No one told us growing up that there will be hardships and obstacles that we will face at some point in our life. It happens to all of us. No one escapes.
Every one of us “always knows” what to do when it’s another person’s problem. But rarely do we really know how we will respond when faced with our own issues.
We easily forget that our issues, “their” issues, or anyone’s issues never start and stop in a day. They aren’t solved in a small segment of time that we can keep track of easily. Dreams, too, never become our reality overnight. Some take a lifetime to achieve.
Since there never is “a quick fix”, endurance is demanded of us when things become difficult. Endurance is also demanded of us when we want to achieve things that are not present today in our lives.
Two totally different possibilities. The first is when we feel we can’t get out. When we want to run away and hide. When we feel we have been “wronged”. The second is created by our innocence in thinking that achieving our goals and our dreams will always be easy.
More times than not (in either situation) we choose not to endure. We stop, give up, and run away. We don’t have the patience to persevere, to search, and to continue to try.
Endurance does not guarantee success.
Endurance only guarantees the possibility of succeeding sometime in the future.
Why then, don’t we always choose to give ourselves this possibility of succeeding no matter how difficult the challenge?
The most fertile ground for expressing the creativity in our lives demands our endurance to balance the frustration, exhaustion, discouragement, and helplessness that we feel in our life against the real possibility of achieving a breakthrough, discovery, and movement that will be good, positive, and helpful.
Our best work happens every day when we keep trying.
Never forget this whether you are chasing a dream or pushing through the fog and the storm of a difficult situation.