Perseverance

A word that gets thrown around in almost every single conversation that entails anything related to success is perseverance. And recently, this word has gained meaning to a whole new level. So, let’s take some time to accessing this facet of life and understand how is persevering important to us and the impacts it causes on us.

Doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man.

— G.K. Chesterton

I am a die hard fan of combat sports; wrestling, mixed martial arts, boxing, what have you. I have been one for quite a large chunk of my adult life. Every single aspect of it; the build towards the fight, the entrances, the crowds cheering, the introductions, the sheer skill and precision of the art form itself; but mostly, I just really love people hitting each other, till one of them falls down.

Although there are singularities that every single bout has, there always is a pattern to everything. There are two basic sorts of matches that we will ever come across. There will either be two favorites battling it out or, it will be a franchise versus an underdog match-up. Although I am almost always invested, the latter category of matches piques my interest much more.

There is a big reason to that, because almost invariably, people that I talk to (who also like combat sports, by the way, before I am labelled a Poindexter), like to see the underdog becoming victorious. And as we have been talking about patterns, all underdogs have one particular quality which makes people’s hearts melt for them and provide a basis for the support that they gather.

This one quality, while called by a multitude of aliases, is grit. The wherewithal to go through whatever it takes to get to the holy grail, the sweet taste of victory. Seeing someone put their heart and soul in to an activity logically should be rewarded with triumph and anything less than that is completely unacceptable. That is why we don’t like to see anyone other than our underdogs securing the victory!

The fascination with this grit, this perseverance is not something that is limited to just combat sports. We can see this in every field that can be thought of. Think of any other sport, other forms of entertainment (movies, TV shows etc.), we can find the presence of grit being extremely desirable. While the sources mentioned aren’t the the only sources we can allude its existence to, they surely are some of the most prominent ones. 

We have been talking about how great it is to be gritty and persevering, there is one facet of it that we forget to take in to account. Being gritty is an amazing thing, but being attached to the image of victory can prove to be quite the opposite!

While persevering, the only image that we hold in our heads is that of our glorious victory, the sound of “We are the Champions” by Queen being sung for us, constantly. However, there is this old adage, that is so true, it is almost annoying. I am sure everyone has heard it. It goes “You win some, you lose some”. And since it is true, it is extremely difficult to maintain an undefeated record in life.

And in case, things don’t go our way, the aforementioned attachment is something that causes us an immense amount of pain. This is very natural to feel and no one is to blame if we do. However, this brings me to the actual topic I wanted to talk about. After persevering for so long, it becomes very difficult to let go of the image, and now with all the pain that is associated with it. Why is that so?

The main reason for this, in my humble opinion, is that there is a certain comfort that accompanies that hurt. How so, one might ask. The answer to this is that over time, we become so used to the image of achieving the targets for ourselves that we don’t leave room for what would happen just in case we don’t. And when the unforeseen happens, we are suddenly forced to think the dreaded question, “Now what?”.

So, sometimes, instead of picking ourselves up after a defeat, we stay stuck to the same image, but this time, the image gets modified to that of not having achieved that target and wallowing, feeling sorry for ourselves. And with this constant hurt that we feel instantaneously, deep deep down, we get the comfort of not having to face the uncertainties that we are supposed to face now.

Is this healthy? Of course not! The more prudent thing to do on facing such a circumstance is to actually embrace the precariousness of times. Will it take time? Of course it will. But with time, we turn ourselves over and understand that our abilities to set goals, achieve targets is not limited!

I would like to end this particular musing like I usually do, asking a daunting question. An obvious solution to subvert the hurt is that we talked about is to have a backup plan. But, the question arises, if we set a backup plan with every single target we set for ourselves, aren’t we taking focus off our actual desire? If anyone has an answer to this, please do let me know of it! Thanks for reading!