Patience and Perseverance

A year ago, I was in South Africa brainstorming ways to pay for a visit to Nepal. One of the ideas I had was to set up an art exhibition. The main obstacle – I hadn’t painted anything in months, and looking back now, I realize that I really wasn’t that good then.

Time passed. My plans changed, and I bought a one way ticket to Nepal. As I was leaving I switched to brainstorming ways to pay for visit back to South Africa. Again I thought of the painting idea. This time I realized it would take more time and practice. Six months, I thought, and then I can sell lots of pictures and make a lot of money.

In the beginning of the year I enrolled in art college and started painting properly for the first time in years. I realized how much I had to learn. Now, after seven months of study and practice, a friend at a gallery has offered to buy a small painting from me, for a small amount of money. I’ve become more realistic about my skills and progress, and am thrilled to have gotten this far.

I was thinking about this today, and I realized that I usually don’t like things that take time. I start out with a huge goal, an unrealistic one, and at the first obstacle I run into, I quit. I’m not good at plodding and making the slow but steady progress that’s needed to get ahead in life. But the majority of success stories will involve a background of hard work, of trial and error, and of a large number of failures. What turned them into successes was the patience and perseverance involved.

A lot of people I know, myself included, are going through changes right now – career changes, lifestyle changes, changes in ideology and mindsets. And no matter how good they are for us, these changes are never easy to make. Even harder, is to stick through the trial and error process involved in getting it right. We naturally want the first thing we do to work out wonderfully, and be a smashing success. But that’s not the way life works.

The experiments are all part of the process, and the best things in life, the greatest successes, reaching that feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction, all takes time. A big part of making changes is finding out what doesn’t work to get to what does, or making adjustments to the things that do work to make them even better.

My prayer is that we will all have the patience, perseverance, and sense of adventure needed to ride out the changes in our lives and make them a success.