Sometimes, all you can do is hang on.
Life is often hard. Sure, what's hard for me isn't even on the map of a west African farmer, and what's hard for him doesn't even appear on my experiential landscape, but we both know the truth:
Sometimes, life is hard.
Each of us faces challenges that we feel ill-equipped to rise to. Each of us struggles sometimes, to "keep on keepin' on." Each of us sometimes consider just giving up, giving in, surrendering to the vicissitudes that comprise "life."
Sometimes...
It makes one wonder why we so often persist in the face of adversity. Our experience ought to teach us to just give up--at some point, the cost : benefit analysis really does suggest that surrender is the smart option--but quite often we persevere. Why?
In my case, I think it's a side effect of irrational optimism. After all this time, you'd think I'd know better, but I keep on hoping that if I can just hold on long enough, things will get better. I shift my grip, I trade hands, I stretch, I tie a knot at the end of the rope and wrap my whole body around it, and just... hang... on.
I've thought that bulldog tenacity was a good thing--the mark of an indomitable will, the mark of a real survivor--but today I'm not persuaded. There's no inherent virtue in endlessly enduring the unendurable. Putting up with cut after cut after cut is not courage; it's masochism. It may even indicate an underlying self-loathing. If reason doesn't temper tenacity, tenacity can become self-destructive.
I'm not there yet--reason and emotion both think there's still hope and it's not time yet to give up--but I'm close.
Close to letting go.
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