Patient Perseverence

The past year has been difficult in so many ways for so many individuals. Everything was new and different, and not always in a positive way. If you're sitting here and reading this that means that you made it. You survived they year 2020 with all of it's bumps, uncertainties, and new learning! Congratulations! 

Perseverance. The definition of the word is "persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success." What does perseverance mean to you?

Cammie McGovern once said, "This feeling will pass. The fear is real but the danger is not." Fear is a human emotion. It's normal. It's expected. It's even valid at times. In connection with anxiety there is a function, a purpose, for these emotions that we don't love to feel and experience throughout our lifetime. Fear comes into play when we experience a perceived danger or threat. This causes physiological changes which result in behavioral changes. You may be familiar with "Fight, Flight, and Freeze." These are a few ways our mind tells our body to respond to threats. 

Our mind often perceives threats as bigger than they truly are. We perceive the threat, emotion kicks in, and if we react quickly, our response can sometimes be more than was needed for the particular situation. Many expressed overwhelming emotion during 2020; feeling like they couldn't go on, like death was certain, overwhelmed for days and weeks at a time. As those emotions were in play, the circumstances often felt impossible. How can we go on in quarantine and isolation? How am I going to work and provide for my family? What if I get sick? What if someone I love gets sick? Will this ever end?

A colleague shared with me the feeling that "2020 is still trying to turn in late homework." While I found the analogy amusing, it was also quite relatable. January 1, 2021 came to pass and we still have our struggles. Relationships continue to have difficulties. Jobs continue to shift and change, come and go. Illness continues to spread and people continue to heal. There was no magic want that set off respite at 12:01 New Years Day to make everything new and wonderful. Yet, here we are. Still moving forward. Still struggling. Still breathing. Still persevering. 

What allowed you to make it through yesterday only came to be because you were able to make it through the day before that, and the week before that, and the month before that. Emotion can make things look and feel much bigger than they are. What feels hopeless is usually not. What feels impossible, usually passes. What hurts in ways that seem unbearable we typical find a way to deal with. Clearly discomfort is a part of the process. Few people I know enjoy feeling overwhelmed, riddled with fear, uncertain of the future. Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were a button we might press to just jump forward to where things felt better? There is no such button, so we much be patient and continue to press on through the discomfort, through the questioning, through the difficult emotions that we muddle through to get to the other side. 

My father shared many valuable lessons with me during my life. I can still hear his voice, full of wisdom and experience as he attempted to help me understand that what I was experiencing at the time was not truly as big as it felt in that moment. He would often sit calmly as I panicked over any number of things and when I gave him space to get a word in he would so gently ask, "What were you worried about on this day last year? What about this day five years ago?" I would always genuinely try to remember that same time the mentioned years prior, and was never able to answer the question, even though I knew I had felt panicked, worried, concerned, uncertain, about many things during those time. The moral of the story is that those things felt so big in those moments and yet I was able to persevere, to survive another day, to continue to press on, as would more than likely be the case again. 

We learn from experience. So the next time you find yourself feeling overwhelmed, hopeless, and unable to see the light of tomorrow; pause. Pause and ask yourself how big this threat is in reality, not in emotional perception. Get yourself grounded and consider what it was you were concerned about this time last year, or five years ago. Can you recall? If you can't, then it wasn't that big in the first place. If you can, then maybe it was significant after all, but you made it through.

Praying blessings over you as you take your experiences of today to learn from and inform how you manage yourself tomorrow.

Grace and Peace.