Endurance

Endurance…how would one define it? Is it the ability to exert oneself for a long period of time? Is it the ability to keep fighting? Can it only surface in times of trouble?

It is known that humans have always had that quality in them – of not giving in, of not giving up, of keeping the battle going. I guess the one true reason why this virtue is omnipresent, is because of the uncertainty of the result. If you don’t already know that you are going to lose, you are very much in the game. You keep fighting; keep giving it your best shot…time and again.

One might easily confuse endurance with strength. Strength can be physical (i.e. the ability to exert force on physical objects using muscles) or mental (i.e. the ability to confront fear, pain, risk/danger, uncertainty, or intimidation…also known as Fortitude). But endurance, I believe, has more to do with external circumstances than with internal qualities. The critical factor to really ‘test your endurance’ is the presence of an opposing force, whose magnitude is such that it makes you leave your zone of comfort and surpass yourself. In such situations, one of three things might happen:

1.       You lose, but you realise that you didn’t give it your best

2.       You lose, but you realise that you gave it your best

3.       You win

Moving from point 1 to point 3, takes time and conscious effort in that direction. Learning to get up once you fall is the point I am trying to make here. And doing that time and again, builds endurance. The following words of Douglas Mallock have always inspired me:

The tree that never had to fight,

For sun and sky and air and light,

But stood out on the open plain,

And always got its share of rain,

Never became a forest king,

But lived and died a scrawny thing.

 

The man who never had to toil,

To gain and farm his patch of soil,

Who never had to win his share,

Of sun and sky and light and air,

Never became a manly man,

But lived and died as he began.

 

Good timber does not grow in ease,

The stronger the wind, the stronger trees

The farther sky, the greater the length

The more the storm, the more the strength,

By sun and cold, by rain and snow,

In tree and men good timbers grow.

 

Where thickest lies the forest growth

We find the patriarchs of both.

And they hold counsel with the stars

Whose broken branches show the scars

This is the common law of life.