Why Persistence Is So Precious

“It’s funny how day by day nothing ever changes, and then you look back and everything is different” – Calvin & Hobbes

Last summer I ate an apricot and mused on the delight I might feel from having my very own apricot tree. Rather than going off to the local nursery and investigating the purchase of a vigorous young specimen I decide to plant the stone, two of them in fact. As a clueless but enthusiastic gardener I hadn’t realised that it was important to break the stone and remove the seed.

The terracotta pots stood against the south facing white wall of the house through all the warmest days of that summer. I diligently watered my apricots but, as the lavender prospered and the bay tree flourished, the apricots stood still. By the autumn they had become a running joke. “I see the apricots are doing well” some wag would mutter walking through the doors into the verdant but tiny space, with its jasmine and geranium, the herb garden threatening to overflow, led by the pungent muscle of the marauding mint. Then the autumn came and I forgot about the apricot.

It’s easy to give up, and we receive plenty of encouragement to do so. We are led to believe that everything can be achieved, and most of it without working too hard. People are falling over themselves to offer us ways of making more money than we have dreamed of in order to live a life of opulence and privilege. But the cost to us of losing the skill of persistence, is a heavy one to bear.

This week I have been working on a programme we’re developing to help people understand their addiction and recover from it in a long term sustainable way. As a first step we’ve written a guide to help people understand how to recognise the signs that their drinking may be out of control. You can download your own free copy of “Out Of Control – Identifying A Problem With Drink” and I’d be grateful if you would forward this mail to anyone you know who might benefit from reading it, either for themselves or someone they know.

I have long felt frustrated that detox and recovery appears to stop at the moment it becomes most necessary to keep going. There is huge value in giving up a destructive habit, but there is similarly great value in developing an understanding of why it became a problem in the first place. This is because change requires persistence and persistence is easier to achieve when you have some sense of why you got into this mess and why you deserve the good and sometimes very hard work you are doing for yourself.

Extracting yourself from a toxic, damaging relationship; changing your lifestyle to eat more healthily and exercise more regularly; giving up destructive drink, drug or gambling habits, all require persistence. The emotional energy that you need to fuel your persistence comes not simply from the notion that you want to stop hurting but from the realisation that you don’t have to and do not deserve to. It comes from the moment of clarity in which you truly understand that you are worth more.

Persistence is never created from denial or an unwillingness to face down the truth. It is most often our determination to keep walking even when it feels as if we are going nowhere that reaps the greatest reward. Change most often takes place in small increments, while our eyes are fixed the horizon, doubting we will ever reach it until we realise we don’t need to, and that its greatest value was in simply pulling us forward.

Persistence is not borne from isolation. It is brought most readily to life through interaction with others, with the gathering of new and useful information. Persistence is strengthened by our asking for help and then using it.

If I had sought advice about my apricot I would have learned that planting the stone was a ridiculous move. It’s funny though, because even when my foolishness dawned on me and the pot just sat there without any apparent activity, I still kept watering it.

A couple of weeks ago, potting some new seeds for the garden I was emptying old pots of their compost and weeds. In one of them was an unfamiliar green shoot which looked as if it was growing with purpose and intent. Carefully digging it out of its pot I held in my hand an apricot stone which had cracked to allow the tiny shoot space to move up through the earth and into the bright spring sunlight. If ever there was a reminder that even in the most unlikely of cases something miraculous can occur, it was this. I know it’s only a plant but it truly came about through persistence.