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| Patience Personified First Lady Martha Washington |
While one week of weight neutrality does not a plateau make
– it offers an opportunity to talk about patience. It took time for me to gain
my weight in the first place and it’ll take time to lose it.
The same concept applies to all of us who seek to pursue
other worthwhile endeavors whether it’s growing a customer base, completing a
college degree, reducing debt, getting a certain type of license or building a
relationship. As unfashionable as it
sounds, those efforts require patience.
The trusted saying “Patience is a Virtue” seems outmoded and
outdated to our current expectations, which have been sharpened by immediate
downloads, microwave meals, a 24/7 news cycle, on-demand media, frenetic flash
animation and any other example of instant satisfaction you can imagine.
When we don’t get something we want now, we tend to get
ticked off.
A good reminder of the need for patience is captured in a
passage from Charles Wentworth Upham’s book The
Life of General Washington: First President of the United States. In that book there’s a quote from first lady
Martha Washington [see photo insert] espousing the need for patience as she
longed to be with her family at Mount Vernon rather than frittering away time in her
symbolic role at the nation’s capital in New
York City
“I am still determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may be; for I have learned from experience that the greater part of happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us, in our minds, wheresoever we go.”
She’s talking about patience and the ability to persevere
through a circumstance toward a desired outcome - but that takes time. The truth is that there are NO overnight
successes because enduring success takes time, which is why patience to endure
to the end is virtuous.
Hopefully, I will be able to practice what I’ve preached in
this blog post this week and there will be less of me to write about after next
week’s weigh-in.
As Viktor Frankl said, we're free to choose our attitude in any circumstance. Not so easy to learn, but very true and very powerful. It's how we choose to look at things and respond to them that matters, not the circumstances themselves. Excellent post.
ReplyDeleteLeanne, excellent reference to Viktor Frankl - the same circumstance can happen to different individuals. It might devastate one while strengthening another. Thanks for adding to and elevating the discussion here!
ReplyDelete