Choose to Take the Journey

Many of my best thoughts have come from my intuition, but in at least one case (I’m sure there are many others), I was embarrassingly wrong. What I’m talking about is how one should approach perseverance.

When your eyes grow weary from reading a long book or your legs grow weak from a long jog, I had originally thought that you should become shortsighted if you needed to find the will to continue. That is, only focus on the next immediate milestone in front of you, whether that be the end of the chapter or the end of the street block. Even though you will be able to push yourself a little further this way, it’s not likely you will be breaking any personal records.

The best way is to actually lose yourself in the process. Get present in the story–see the sights, hear the sounds, smell the smells. Be in the moment of the jog–feel the tension in your muscles, the flow of blood in your veins, the cool evaporation of sweat off your skin. When you lose yourself, you are neither reaching for the future nor ruminating on the past. You are in the here and now. By the time you snap back into your mental dialogue, you will be surprised at how long you’ve been going at it.

I have never finished a long book, say over 700 pages, or finished a long jog, say over 4 miles, without giving myself fully to the process. When I think back to the most grueling jogs I’ve had, they may have only been 1 or 2 miles, but I found them insufferable because I was fixated on how much farther I had to go. Whenever I have exceeded my own expectations, in swimming or writing for example, I didn’t think about it. I had simply lost myself in the process and the act of barreling past my previous limits was something I only thought about after the fact.

Do not embark on a journey because of what you expect to get back in return. Do not go on an adventure just to tell others where you have been. Let yourself fall in love with the process and allow the results to flow out of you automatically.