By Robert Clements
Perseverance and the Past…!
What a wonderful feeling it was for each of us as we watched Chandrayaan 3 land on the moon. Though, what made us tense was the memory of the crash landing that happened the last time. That we should all be proud of is that after that failure we didn’t quit. We decided to do it all over again. That is perseverance!
It means succeeding because you’re determined to, not because you’re entitled to. Achievers don’t sit back and wait for success because they think the world ‘owes them’. Ask God for direction, then go forward and refuse to quit. You must adopt the attitude of the man who said, “We are determined to win. We’ll fight them until hell freezes over, and if we have to, we’ll fight them on ice.”
It also means, you recognize, life is not one long race, but many short ones in succession. Each task has its own challenges and each day its own events. You have to get out of bed next morning and run again, but it’s never exactly the same race. It’s said that Columbus faced incredible difficulties while sailing west. He encountered storms, experienced hunger, deprivation and extreme discouragement. The crews of his three ships were near mutiny. But his account of the journey says the same thing over and over: “Today, we sailed on.” And his perseverance paid off.
Perseverance means you never quit: At a sales convention a manager said to his firm’s sales force, “Did the Wright brothers ever quit?” “No!” they responded. “Did Charles Lindburg ever quit?” “No!” they shouted. “Did Lance Armstrong ever quit?” “No!” they bellowed. “Did Thorndike ever quit?” There was a long, confused silence. Then a salesperson shouted, “Who in the hell is Thorndike? Nobody’s ever heard of him.” The sales manager snapped back, “Of course you haven’t – that’s because he quit!” I remember a verse I learned on my grandmother’s knee, “Bob,” she used to say quoting from the scriptures, “We will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”
Perseverance means you turn adversity into advancement. Just look back at every pitfall you’ve been through, every failure you’ve faced and you’ll see it’s all helped create a stronger, more resilient you. Adversity is a great opportunity to develop muscle, so go ahead, build strength today, don’t cry and complain. Perseverance means stopping not because you’re tired, but because the task is done.
Robert Strauss once said, “Success is like wrestling a 1000-pound gorilla. You don’t quit when you are tired – you quit when the gorilla is tired.”
And finally, perseverance demands all that you have. It’s more than just trying or working hard: It’s binding yourself emotionally, intellectually, physically and spiritually to an idea, purpose or task until it has been completed. As author Judy Wardell Halliday said, “Dreams only become reality when we keep our commitments to them.
Today, let’s applaud our country for her perseverance..!
But even as we pat ourselves on the back for our perseverance in landing a spacecraft on the moon, let us also use that same perseverance for something our country needs much, and that is to persevere to forget our past.
We hoisted our national flag last week on Independence Day, but just imagine if the flag failed to hoist itself!
“Why aren’t you going up?” we ask, huffing and puffing to pull the rope that holds the flag, as the flag refuses to move!
“Because I can’t leave the ground, I have too much baggage! I’m stuck!”
Now I’m going to move away from that rather grim picture I’ve painted for you.
A few days ago, billionaire and Infosys’s chairman Mr Narayana Murthy, quoted Former US President Franklin Roosevelt, who defined a true democracy as having four freedoms; freedom of expression, freedom from fear, freedom of faith, and freedom from want!
But, and do get this straight, all these four freedoms are birthed and are possible only if we have freedom from the past.
I’m going to quickly go back to the Chandrayaan-3 take-off to the moon: How glorious the take-off was, how proud we felt as a country, but lo and behold, a little later we watched concerned as something fell of the rocket, and a little later some else and something more. But even as we show concern, the scientists smile, because they know that for the rocket to rise, the boosters on either side have to fall off and later other parts too, to allow the rocket to rise, go faster and finally land on the moon as it did two days ago.
The same for our democracy. We need to give up our past. Independence means getting rid of the baggage of the past and moving on. Stop talking of the horrors of the partition, or what the Mughals did or what the British took away. Leave hurts behind because in getting ensnared in them, we don’t move forward. Europe was, once made up of little kingdoms that warred with each other, till one day, they let go off their past, decided that to become powerful and strong, they needed to form a union, the EU came together, and today is a formidable force in the world.
When we refuse to give up our past, which often are memories of injustice, and terror, and slavery and subjugation, it fuels today’s anger and hate and violence! And this fuel, these reminders of the past are what politicians use to keep you in that state of unrest forever.
Today as we celebrate Chandrayaan 3 landing on the moon, let us remember to persevere on one more failure that is being exploited by our politicians; our failure to move away from our past.
Move away in the same way we moved away from the failure of Chandrayaan 2 and with that we will truly become a successful and independent nation…!
(The Author conducts an Online Writers and Speakers Course. For more details send a thumbs-up to him on WhatsApp 9892572883 [email protected])