Perseverance and Endurance

 

PERSEVERANCE AND ENDURANCE

Impossible struggle forces you to ask “what really matters?”

Right now is an extraordinarily worrying and disconcerting time on so many levels. On a personal level I am struggling with not being fit and well in my body.

My wife, reflecting upon her deep suffering writes so wisely:

“My world, so empty of business,

becomes a place of waiting, seeking inner peace and understanding.

The things I know are hard won amidst the decades of intense suffering.

The emptiness of action, is replaced by the stillness of pure being.”

“Stillness of pure being” ………….

How could anyone, apart from those who have experienced profound pain and the loss of ability on every conceivable level, begin to even grasp what “stillness of pure being” means?

I’ve gained some kind of insight, but frustratingly my words are clumsy. I just don’t have the vocabulary.

Nonetheless, what matters especially now, I think, is the courage to step up, to deal with what needs dealing with.

That, however, as my wife shows, takes the most extraordinary strength, perseverance and endurance:

Strength that comes from character.

Perseverance that comes from the never ending struggle to carry on.

Endurance that comes from Spirit.

It’s the latter that astonishes me most about my wife. I just don’t know how she manages to endure at all.

Only that she describes it as “Grace”.

Grace, surely, is what the whole world is crying out for, as never before.

Perhaps we need to look for lived humility and grace, not in the mainstream, not in celebrity, not in institutions, not in the ignorance of others, but in those who endure the greatest suffering without end, where the only choice is to seek something beyond or within the suffering.

Some place where you can find the grace to survive.