If I had been clever 9 months ago I would have chosen a theme word for my 2012.
I’ve read about the concept on blogs lots before and it seems like a good idea—declaring a theme for one’s year—but for some reason I always forget to do it myself.
Well, it might be too late to set a new year resolution for 2012, but I say it’s never to late to set a lifetime resolution. Unless you’re dead, in which case, what’s the point really?
But let’s not think about such morbid things, for I am still very much alive, and therefore very much capable of setting a lifetime resolution, and it occurs to me that lately my biggest challenge is persisting.
So often in my life I give up long before I should, simply because I am too passive or lazy or apathetic to fight for what I actually do want. So much effort, persistence.
Observe:
• In our marriage, I am almost always the one to give in during arguments. Kyle is just so much more stubborn than I am in most ways, and it exhausts me to keep arguing my point when I know that eventually he’ll probably win anyway. So instead, I usually just give in after one or two halfhearted tries.
• In my health, I go through this cycle of “I WILL BE SO HEALTHY!” and then, when I step on the scale two days later and I see that nothing’s changed (or worse, that I’ve actually gained weight despite my hard hard work), I’m like, EFF THIS, I’M HAVING CAKE.
• In lots of other ways, some of which I won’t confess here because I have to save some things for my book.
Copious examples aside, the truth is that I’m not very good at persisting. (This you might already know about me. Heaven knows I know it about myself.)
But what is the point in life if not to strive constantly for improvement, for betterment, for the mother loving pursuit of happiness that we’re always on about?
So I’m resolving, once more, to persist.
That’s my word for my life: persist.
And to help remind me I drew out my favourite quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson (himself an inspiring example of persistence): That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do—not that the nature of the thing is changed, but that our power to do it is increased.
My mom and I love this quote. I bonded with this quote the very first time I heard it, and every time I’ve heard it since has strengthened my belief in its truthfulness.
Because I know it. I know, in the very depths of my poetic core, that if I really do persist in those things that are important to me, eventually my power to do them will increase and I will be proud of myself in the end.
And that’s what this is really all about, isn’t it: being proud of myself. Being not a failure. I’m turning 26 next week and I’m feeling old and unsuccessful and what I really need at unsettling times like these is the simple reassurance that not quitting is, in fact, almost always better than quitting.
You can borrow it if you want.
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