Fall seven times, stand up eight.- Japanese Proverb

If you’re planning a long backpacking or hiking trip you take the time to consider what gear you want to bring along.  Everything you bring you carry and everything you carry weighs something.  The more you bring the more your back must bear.  You whittle the list until you’re sure it’s down to the essentials, the things you need to do what you need to do.

When I think of packing for life and my soul there are several essential character traits that I want to make sure I bring with me.  One of these is perseverance.  Perseverance is defined as a “steady persistence in adhering to a course of action, a belief, or a purpose; steadfastness.”

It’s not a common trait seen on the trail of life.  Shakespeare has this to say about it:

Perseverance, dear, my lord,
Keeps honour bright: To have done, is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty nail
In monumental mockery.

How do we develop this?  One word – suffer.  The more you suffer the more you require perseverance.  It’s produced in your soul in the amount that is demanded.  If you live a life of ease and repose you’ll require very little.  If your goals, dreams and aspirations challenge, prod and spur you on your perseverance tank will fill commensurately.  Like a muscle, perseverance will adapt and grow stronger only to the level of stress that you bring to it.  Lift heavier weights get a stronger back.  As you persist through more difficult trials you will develop more perseverance.

The thing about perseverance too is that it’s not the end result.  If that was it what a downer it would be.  So, if perseverance is produced by suffering, what’s next?  What does perseverance develop?  Character.  And after character comes hope.  Yep, the path to hope goes through pain.  It’s why one author in the bible says that we are to consider hard times and trials with joy because we know good things are produced in us, in our souls.

Sorry there’s no quick fix, no pill one can swallow to get this.  There’s only one way up this mountain and it’s the hard way.  So what are you going to do?  How about fall seven times, stand up eight.  Fall again?  Get up again. And again.  And again.  Don’t quit.  Don’t give up.  As Thomas Edison says

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.