Perseverance - Day 1
“We’re born with some values,” a friend said. “
Others we need to acquire.”“One day at a time” and forgiveness are values I acquired out of necessity. They’ve been hard won. I’d go through a difficult time and discover each value as a survival tool. Sometimes after a tough experience, I would ask, “What was the value of that?” Later, I would see that from the experience a value, such as compassion or surrender, had worked its way into my life.These values exist. When we practice them, they become part of us.By the time I got to chemical dependency treatment in 1973, I had continued to use drugs in the face of all adversity and against all odds. I had begun using other drugs when narcotics were hard to find. Despite everyone screeching at me to stop and being challenged at every level not to drink and use, I continued to get high.Nothing—not the criminal justice system, the pleadings of people I loved, the consequences my lifestyle created—could cause me to veer from my path. When it didn’t look like there was any possible way to get more alcohol and drugs, I found them. I even woke up in an emergency room, suffering from an overdose, where I ripped off cardiac monitors and headed for the exit screaming, “I want more!” When I went into treatment, I still found ways, although they weren’t very impressive, to chemically change how I felt.When things began turning around for me in treatment, when I began considering another way of life, I had to do an inventory and tell someone my shameful secrets. By then I decided that if I put even half the energy into doing the right thing as I’d invested in doing the wrong thing, there was little I couldn’t do. I worked hard at my inventory. I was able to come up with a lot of character defects, moral deficiencies, and flaws. The clergyperson I talked to listened carefully. When he asked whether I could see anything good about myself, I said no.“I can,” he said. “You are persistent. In the face of all odds, you have a remarkable ability to persevere.”Most of our values are acquired through hard work. But once in a while we get a free one. We don’t have to work at it. At least not that hard. Like in the game of Monopoly, we get a card that tells us to advance to “Go” and collect $200.Being persistent is the one value that comes naturally to me. I thank God for that.
Value: Perseverance is the value this week. Perseverance has many faces: staying with a thing in the face of all odds, trying again and again, trying harder, figuring out how to overcome opposition no matter how creative we need to get, crawling over broken glass to accomplish our goals, going to any lengths even when we’d rather not.
From the book: 52 Weeks of Conscious Contact
